I did some IFS which worked great, but I've always been on the prone-to-multiple-personality side of the spectrum so it was very natural for me to identify parts, and finding the Self mapped well to previous 'focus on the Spirit / the presence of God' Christian meditation.
None of it was conducted in a full trance, but a lot of it went on in my internal imaginary space which is probably difficult to access for people who don't customarily have one?
See, this is what confuses me! People saying "my internal imaginary space" with the same casualness they talk about "my bedroom".
Is this just the fact that if I tell you to visualize a tiger, you can visualize a tiger? Or is it some more complicated place where things happen independent of your "conscious will"?
I feel like the people who say they can't visualise things might be a bit disappointed with the actual experience. I can look at the tiger, and it gets more detailed when I focus on a part of it, but I can't like... have sex with the tiger or anything.
Oh, incompetence! Never can my dreams engender the sexy beast sex I long for. The tiger indeed appears, but stuffed or flimsy, or with impure variations of shape, or of an implausible size, or all too fleeting, or with a touch of the dog or the bird.
As an aphantasiac, I spent most of my life so far (up until my early 20s) believing that people were speaking figuratively when they said to picture or visualize something. I didn't realize that some (most?) people can literally see something inside their mind.
Yeah I know this is a thing. My comment was really like: a lot of ... aphantasiacs, if that's the right work - seem to think this is some kind of amazing ability they lack, whereas I find it fairly boring and non useful.
I can't remember images, no. I remember the words my mind uses to describe things. I could probably draw a tiger from memory, but I don't know how detailed I could make it (even were I better at drawing than I am). So maybe that means that an image, or at least a symbolic representation, of a tiger is in there somewhere? I certainly recognize people without needing to translate them into words. But I can't, at will, pull up images of them
Interesting. Perhaps if you practiced drawing stuff from memory, you could develop your visualization. But surely you’ve tried that. I can’t imagine what it’s like ;) - sorry, that’s probably a stale joke by now.
How realistic is the imagery? Do you need to close your eyes to imagine it? Or can you imagine the tiger while looking at something else?
What about your dreams? Are they hyperrealistic — i.e. you see a lot of details?
I can't visualize things at all well (at least with my waking consciousness). But I'm not a bad draftsperson. I could probably sketch a moderately realistic tiger from memory. So the image is in my brain somewhere — but I can't access it unless I put down on paper. But my dreams are all hyperrealistic for me. In fact, I've dreamt of tigers and they're quite realistic in my dreams. I've never been able to figure out why my dreaming consciousness is so vivid, but my waking imagination is so blank.
Reasonably realistic, but a bit patchy and kind of static where I'm not focusing directly. Don't need to close my eyes, in fact I'd say that closing my eyes makes it slightly harder.
I do dream, but I (personally) think that dreams are not at all interesting so I never bother evaluating them.
Tiger Tiger, burning bright, in the forest of the night
What mortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?
I think everything that goes on in our minds takes place in an internal imaginary space. The proposition that anything objectively true happens there is the confusing proposition to me.
More complicated, but it's all me. It's like 'visualise a tiger' but the tiger is situated in a place?
By default mine is just a totally dark space but I can give it a backdrop if I concentrate (similar mechanism to memory recall but it doesn't have to be exactly somewhere I've been, it's just easier to start with memory to have enough detail).
Sometimes I just do conversation without bothering with the physical layout, which is more like being on the phone to the other aspect of me? When I'm paying attention to verbal thoughts I normally internally hear them.
But IFS sometimes worked better when I actually placed the parts in the internal space like we were having some kind of meeting - it's still me arranging it, but it let them act more fluidly.
I also use this for eg designing backstory and personality for larp characters, imagining story scenes, practicing conversations with my model of other people, etc etc
>By default mine is just a totally dark space but I can give it a backdrop if I concentrate (similar mechanism to memory recall but it doesn't have to be exactly somewhere I've been, it's just easier to start with memory to have enough detail).
This is also my experience. The way I'd interpret "my internal imaginary space" is that unless I'm specifically imagining the tiger in the room with me, it's in some vague "off-camera" location that by default has a dark or undefined backdrop but could have some other context if I focus on imagining that as well. This "location" feels the same as when I'm calling up detailed visual memories, and it's easier to visualize details in either recollections or imaginings if I close my eyes so I'm not distracted by real visual input.
The visual impression of the "off camera" location is either superimposed on my regular visual field almost like if I were looking into a slide viewer with my non-dominant eye, or less commonly it's in the upper or side fringes of my visual field.
Mine doesn't overlay my visual field - I can have a pacing tiger in my off camera space while looking at things, to the usual limits of split concentration (although it is easier to do complicated scenes with closed eyes). I can also very faintly overlay the tiger in the real world but it's very faint. If the space is anywhere it's literally inside my head, behind my eyes.
There seem to be huge differences in natural ability but also training effects (insight meditation, visualization meditations). Friends had fully decked out internal rooms they liked to hang out in and inspect without any training. Other ones could just silence their thoughts, fill out their whole field with a color or orgasm without touching themselves.
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Before meditation/insight, I had difficulty feeling like I could visualize anything. Even close to cessation my mind is usually still talking a bit (Vipassana cycling not concentration jhanic Arc). However, getting towards 4th path and doing light Kassina meditation seemed to have helped a lot. Both with my mind quieting a bit when I want and in general, visualization and letting my mind give me answers like the IFS parts.
I think the insight side of this helped with just letting things be. Realizing that I am not any of the thoughts or process/all of them. Experience already is the answer calculated by relevance realization/predictive processing. The thoughts which say they are looking for the answer are status reports of what's going on, but it's not "me" doing anything.
It's similar to realizing that I can't solve a tricky math problem. I can learn about the structure of the objects I am working on, try to apply specific techniques but at some point (actually at all points) my brain will do calculations which I don't have conscious access to. I can fill the time where my brain is working on the problem with a lot of chatter or not. Asking for constant updates on how the calculation is doing or not.
A different framework would be shifting attention and keeping it on things my subconscious throws up which meditation can help with since it's to a good part about training attention.
Using the framework Kax_sotala used on reddit: Noticing very quick thoughts or rejections becomes easier when you are trying to count the frames of your reality and trying to notice intentions before your actions (https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1cx3mp6/book_review_the_others_within_us/l55gie7/). You can then try to keep your attention on that "submind/process/whatever". I am sometimes missing bigger constructed things focusing on the fast parts.
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I will start IFS next week and see what happens. Before meditation my thought process would have just been questioning everything that came up until it would have maybe gone towards incompleteness/the strange loopy nature of anything I was doing. If I was seeing beauty it would question what beauty is. If I was visualizing a beach for 0.1s it would question whether it was really a beach, taking everything apart.
Now, when I had a moment where I was mad after talking to my parents for no good reason, I came home and lay down to investigate it. My mind started mentioning school and how I hated them for sending me there. This was a mix of thoughts coming up and "me" making guesses but realizing that me making a guess is also an answer the algorithm of my mind provides. Reality is already the answer. Then, I actually started to visualize some Doom like scenes of my tearing out brains and interpreted it as the part that was very, very angry and hurt and then came another part which I interpreted as the manager, which was managing things by putting emotions to the side and being a bit of a psychopath taking care of things. And then there was the self part which told the hurt part that it and the psychopath would protect the hurt part and telling the psychopath part that I would trust it to take care of things if it was necessary but that right now it wasn't as necessary. All of this was somewhere in between the total trance and no meta-thoughts vs only meta-thoughts and questioning.
Maybe, it's also that insight let's me escape some trapped priors where before it would have been mostly the psychopath talking or something else.
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Light Kassina meditation seems to help with visualization though this seems to also depend on my stage in the cycle of insight. I should investigate this.
In some ways the trick with visualization is similar. You can't visualize things. Your mind can. It's doing it right now. Though there are very interesting questions here about eyes closed, eyes open, actual "internal space" vs e.g. using the signals from your eyes when they are closed. There are different types of light Kassina meditation. One where you go: Give me an image of the candle flame and wait. The other more Ingram style where you start off with the afterimage of something. I am doing the second and am still unsure whether the second ever shifts to the first. The second one seems to be interpolating things in a "space of experience" the brain isn't used to which leads to cool results. Looking long enough at the dark and you brain might see something there especially if you shift your attention to anything interesting that appears for a part of a second. Similar to psychedelics in the result in some ways but doing it with your own power. Is this space the same as "internal images?"
One interesting thing that happens (I think mostly in A&P territory) is that I might close my eyes and then after a few seconds I am looking at discord on my phone or seeing my friends talk and then I open my eye and realize that it wasn't real. I don't think this happened before I started meditating, but I am not sure. Total meditation time less than
1k hours over 1.5 years but I already had Streamentry.
--- Random aside:
Maybe, I had BPD which seems to super push people towards enlightenment. If someone tells me they got streamentry without practice my first question would be whether they have BPD and ADHD/Autism. Marsha Linnehan the inventor of DBT had BPD and became a Zen master but had A&P/maybe streamentry beforehand. Her autobiography is very touching.
I know 3 other friends who have ADHD/Autism and diagnosed BPD and streamentry without or with little practice. This seems absurd. However, I also know a lot of autistic and BPD people so there might be a strong sampling bias here. I know one other person who got Streamentry without practice. She is somewhat autistic (idk if diagnosed) and I don't know whether she has BPD but she might.
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I am no expert but I would highly discourage people from trying to do magic/believing in demons, especially with psychedelics unless/until they really know what they are doing. Get a teacher and some friends who will tell you that you are going insane.
> 1) the total and final elimination of any sense that there is anything called “attention” or “awareness” that is different from, separate from, or unrelated to bare phenomena;
2) the perfect direct comprehension of all sensations in the entire field where and as they are by themselves, as perception and the sensations are the same thing, so the parity between perception and reality is perfectly one to one at all times, meaning that the question of parity is actually completely eliminated perceptually, as there are just sensations;
3) the total naturalness of the field, such that everything is obviously happening completely on its own in a perfectly causal way;
4) the total integration of all sense doors into one unified and all-pervading “sense door” as mentioned in the Time and Space models section (meaning that all sensations appear to be just qualities of this perfectly integrated, boundaryless, fluxing, created-on-the-fly volume), which also specifically means that all thoughts are perceived naturally as part of this same integrated, fluxing volume;
5) the direct and immediate perception that time and space are created out of sensations that arise and vanish now, such that the sense of time and space as existing real entities is entirely seen through;
6) all sensate phenomena without exception self-liberate automatically, meaning that the experience of such questions as, “Is this field awake?” yields a wonderfully direct and satisfying experience of centerlessness and directness of the whole interdependent moment of that same question;
7) any sense of a this-and-that is fundamentally completely uprooted at the perceptual level (not that ordinary discrimination doesn’t function as before), and that this holds up over the long-haul, meaning off-retreat and for years in the face of the strongest vicissitudes of life, across insight cycles, across jhanas and other shifts, and is the only and default perceptual mode at all times when there are any sensations of any kind occurring.
I am not sure I am 100% there yet I will be able to tell more in a year ^^.
To describe it differently it felt like 1st path gave me the solution to the problem of the purpose of life/all of these other stupid problems. The solution is emptiness/incompleteness. Understanding that on some experiential level resolved my depression, made me pretty contend and shifted me in the direction of no-self. After that I could always remind myself that everything was always fine no matter what happened. However, I wasn't necessarily experiencing it in every moment which didn't really change until 4th path territory.
3rd path was about actually being in this present moment for the first time/understanding what luminosity/non-duality actually mean. From there it was already pretty obvious what getting to 4th path would mean on a conceptual level though not experientially.
Then there were some shifts towards more emptiness, less body schema construction, less "this and that" until I had the first moment where it felt like I had gotten 4th path but then fell out of it again and that has been happening for a while. The first time I was super nervous about losing it again and not getting it backed now I am very chill about it which helps because the trying to get/have something seems to be the actual problem.
What I would add to the longer definition is that it's incredibly relaxing not to have to do anything because everything is happening on it's own even the movement of attention.
When I choose to imagine a tiger, I don’t exactly choose what that tiger looks like, nor what form it takes. For me, when I choose to imagine a tiger, initially, a tiger’s face forms against a black, almost non-existent background; other people, on the other hand, might imagine the profile of a tiger’s body in a rich, natural environment (and I imagine there is a lot more sensorial variation than that). I can always choose to modify the tiger in my mind in part or whole, but every choice to imagine or re-imagine the tiger isn’t really so much a choice to imagine something as it is a choice to begin a mental process that results in an emergent imaginary outcome … That’s the way it is for me, at least. Do other people feel like the imagined experiences their mind produces are much more autonomously and deliberatively created than that?
I generally find that when I imagine a tiger I first get a kind of tiger signifier - if I insist on more detail, to me it's the body rather than the head that comes most naturally, faces are difficult! - and if I examine it in more detail it generates more detail, much like the process of remembering a dream.
I can be fussy about the exact details but the more I focus on one detail the fuzzier the rest of it gets, much like focusing on something in your actual visual field, but somewhat more so (I don't have very good imaginary peripheral vision).
When I was a child, I had a persistent problem where I could visualize lots of things (in my "internal imaginary space, perhaps), which was nice for reading books or just when I was bored on car trips, but whenever I spent too much time visualizing a sufficiently detailed scene, earthquakes would start happening in it to tear it apart.
(Well, what I thought were earthquakes at the time. As I understand, most earthquakes don't actually involve chasms opening in the ground everywhere, but that's what kept happening in my visualizations.)
>As I understand, most earthquakes don't actually involve chasms opening in the ground everywhere
Now I'm imagining a parent seeing their kid imagining things, deciding "all right that's enough of that", and reaching inside the kid's imagination to rip the setting in half.
My imaginary space is similar to how others described it: black background, full body tiger, if I choose to I can focus on its part like fluffy striped fur over its shoulder sockets. Rarely, things go uncontrollably wrong with my imagination space. Some parts of the tiger (paws, ears) begin to oscillate in size and weight. Strangely, teeth sometimes increase in weight so much that the head involuntarily drops. And then I sympathetically feel the weight in my own teeth. Sometimes the tiger would turn into a caricature or a stuffed toy, like someone else mentioned; and then I have to shape it back into its normal shape.
I can imagine an avatar of myself cuddling the tiger. Or the tiger can be an avatar of myself, and I sense the kinetics of its movements. But it is always an avatar, never actually me. Even when I'm seeing things from its POV, it's because the camera is placed in its eyes for the purpose of the scene. *Me* is the room, whatever contains this scene, plus whatever goes on outside. The entirety of *me* is too big to be inside the imagination scape.
This imagination scape can be filled with anything else, too. Rehearsal of an email reply imagined on a disemcomputered screen. Voice-only conversation. Full-color full-senses memory. A path through space I'm about to take, sans clutter like buildings alongside the road or other cars. I can project this space onto the world at whatever scale. Pocket tiger. Mountain-sized tiger. Visual "flashback" overlaid over terrain. But filling this space with... a snake named Sabby? that is supposed to be discovered, not invented? that has agency independent of mine? I'd have to make a lot of deliberate choices and then pretend them away. (Pretending away a choice isn't too weird in imagination scape. I can pretend like I'm not controlling the tiger, and see what tiger thing it does, and it attacks my avatar, and I can pretend it's taking all I've got to fight it off. But there's still a level of understanding where I know that I'm actually controlling the tiger, and choose my avatar's competence in fending off the tiger.) So I can summon Sabby, but what would I get out of this role play that I hadn't already scripted or that doesn't involve Sabby's fangs getting big and heavy and dropping to Photoshop-checkered ground?
When I do IFS, it's more complicated than me visualizing a tiger. For me, it's the same place where I practice or experience prayer; it's in my "inner sanctum". When I encounter God, or a part, in my "inner sanctum" it feels like inviting them in to my private space, and interacting with a agent over whom I do not have full conscious control. I could choose to evict God from my inner sanctum; I could choose to pull out different aspects of myself into distinct entities for me to interact with. God feels external to me, and vast, and more outside of my control; God often doesn't answer my questions, for example, where my parts always do. But even for my parts, I don't control what they bring to the table. (This feels akin to the fact that I can't stop being sad by wishing; I can't stop being hungry by deciding.) I have a sensation that I could *force* my parts to say certain things, but I would just be lying to myself. I could also take a part of me and put it in a God-costume and make it say things; but I don't have control over what the actual God-entity says.
I have also had a couple of lucid dreams; and that was a very different experience from going into my "inner sanctum". My inner sanctum is much more mundane than a lucid dream. I remain my presence in the real world; in that sense, it *is* like imagining a tiger. But it's also deeper/richer than just imagination (though imagination can often bring me there). If I really had to say what my inner sanctum is, I would say is my spiritual awareness. It's where the image of God (the non-material spirit that is in me, my "core self", my "soul") can interact with spiritual (non-material) reality. My inner sanctum is thus the place in myself where I interface with the spiritual reality. (Scott, my less-flattering hypothesis of your experience with IFS is that you haven't developed a spiritual awareness.)
Note: I don't think that I am anywhere near the multiple personality side of the spectrum; and yet this is easy for me. I think my practice as a Christian softened me to be open to interacting with my parts / opened me up to a spiritual reality beyond the material.
What's confusing you exactly? It sound a bit like afantasia. I read about people realizing they have it way later in their lives. It's associated with autism/BAP and face blindness as well, if having a hard time remembering faces is your thing as well. But maybe I'm just reading it wrong.
I'm not sure how others would answer, but as a writer I'd say it comes half from the same place as where my fictional characters and their personality and dialogue comes from, just with something like introspection and Focusing-like "felt senses" filling in for the substantial half.
I think this is the confusion right here. It's like the discourse over whether one has an "internal dialogue," with some people on one side being incredulous that others are different.
Simple fact: some people have fairly rich, easily accessed imaginal spaces, complete with visuals and narrative. If you've ever seen a small child playing with toys and talking to itself, that's what you're witnesses.
If you don't experience this yourself, that's OK: you're like one of the people without internal dialogues. But you should ~not~ be incredulous that others have this.
I’ve always been able to imagine stories in pretty vivid detail that surprised me on occasion.
I’ve only ever had one “psychedelic” experience but it was totally different. I also had it without ever having taken a psychedelic. Felt like I was experiencing direct reality. I don’t know how else to explain it, but it was a lot different than what’s described here. This sounds like people vividly imagining things.
I'm the child of a diagnosed (and briefly institutionalized) manic depressive with significant auditory and visual religious hallucinations. She wrote a thousand page religious text of visions, and I don't believe in it, but it's totally coherent with respect to her religion.
I clearly inherited some of her mental predispositions, but a high functioning version, and my daughter seems the same. Also I have some synaesthesia.
Every time you do one of these posts about inner mental life, meditation, self induced euphoria, IFS, whatever... my experience is "oh, that sounds familiar. these people took something I do, or used to do, and did a good job of exploring it".
I perceive (and I think maybe other people would also perceive) a spectrum running from "visualize a tiger", to "pretend there's a tiger", to "let go of your inhibitions and just fully commit to pretending there's a tiger", to "i am having a delusion about a tiger", to "this tiger is real and nobody can convince me otherwise". You could plot this spectrum purely in terms of how little of your attention is on your sensorium. Full delusion is just like trapped priors.
I used to experience a sense of vastness at night sometimes while trying to fall asleep. Sometimes I would lean in to this feeling and "experience" traveling the cosmos at an impossible scale. Sometimes I would also lay awake at night staring at the LED numbers on my alarm clock and "flex" them to be larger or smaller or slightly different colors. I would say this was putting a very gentle toe into "i am having a delusion about a tiger" territory. Or maybe I can astral project! Who knows, ha ha.
The scariest parenting day of my life was when my three year old screamed "I can't see! I can't see! I'm blind! I can't see!" from the back of our car on a long drive for like fifteen minutes during a tantrum.
I don't want to go to the "demons are in the room right now" place where my mom went. It happened for a lot of reasons, including chemical, but also including the way her religion encouraged her to have daily contact with that part of her mind. So I work to control that aspect of myself, to have measured and mediated contact with that part of *my* mind.
So I guess what I'm saying is, people vary in how much they can replace external stimulus with internal imagination, and for a lot of people it's a choice to keep or lose contact with sensory reality, and *hic sunt dracones^h^h^h daemones* on the far side. It's no surprise to me that IFS is beneficial for people and also leads therapists and patients alike to believe in demons.
Thank you for your comment, that was very thoughtful and helpful. Have you ever read the book, "When God Talks Back" by T. M. Luhrmann? It's about the history of American Evangelical Christianity and the way it relates to emotional imagination. The author also discusses, and even tries out, other spiritual paths with similar characteristics. I would actually describe it as Spiritual gonzo journalism and it's an excellent read.
What is confusing about an internal imaginary space ( quotes omitted)? Everything that goes on in our minds occurs in that space. The idea that anything objectively true goes on in our mind is the confusing proposition to me.
"prone-to-multiple-personality side of the spectrum"
Could you, uh, say more about this? Do you have giant gaps in your memory where people report you acting differently and using a different name? What's the underlying spectrum? Extreme moodiness? Do you dissociate or something?
I'm really interested in the concept of multiple personalities and would love to hear more.
No, those are all more full on DID/multiple type things - I've never lost time or externally gone by another name or even really explicitly had independent parts switch front. (I have had a friend with classic DID with an entirely separate person that showed up for a bit after a traumatic event, and several with multiplicity of the multiple names and swapping out who is driving varieties.)
I am more just prone to identifying the different modes I operate in (like, the Efficiency Beast that gets stuff done but is quite callous and socially impatient, the Chameleon that does social situations, etc). Some of these sometimes act without bothering to consult my conscious processing, but no more than eg a person in flow state does.
From observation it seems people are on a spectrum of this from experiencing themselves as a very singular entity, through recognising conflicting motivations within themselves, naming and personifying those motivations to an increasing extent, being able to 'wake up' characters and models of other people enough to converse and interact internally, to having alters that are multiple full fledged people sharing one body, to having the awkward effects of losing time / uncontrolled switching personality.
I can easily name parts and with some effort wake up characters, but I still have a central self.
"the Efficiency Beast that gets stuff done but is quite callous and socially impatient, the Chameleon that does social situations, etc"
How is that not just contextually-appropriate personality modulation? I get more focused when I have stuff to do too, and I generally act more polite and extroverted at parties. On some level that's just basic adulting. What makes you think that your behavior lies on some spectrum of pathology?
That's why I call it a spectrum - there's a gradual shading between 'I just modulate my personality for the context' through 'I have a set of competing forces within my mind that manifest in certain ways and compete with each other but they're all fundamentally aspects of me, or deliberate creations' to 'I am made up of multiple distinct people none of which is centrally more me than the others'.
To some extent it's just a way of relating to the competing motivations that most people have, but at each end it gets fairly clearly distinct (and sometimes hard to understand the other end).
Sure. I'm interested in the specific thing that makes you view it as pathological as opposed to normal variation. Do you act contextually inappropriate? Do you dissociate under stress? Do people complain that you act crazy?
I view multiple personalities as a kind of normal variation, it only becomes pathological when eg losing time and uncontrollably switching at a level that has a negative impact on everyday living.
Fewer comments like this, please (medium warning - 50% of a ban). Not even against this opinion, but you can't drive-by with inflammatory comments and not support them.
Fair enough. I take your point. I feel that psychology is essentially a group behaviour that cements tribal inclusion without in any way addressing the underlying existential issues that beset the anthropomorphically forged human ego. So, to me, it's more of a cult than anything else.
Uh, and is there anybody who does in fact legitimately "address the underlying existential issues that beset the anthropomorphically forged human ego"? How can we tell?
I feel like just talking about it is a start. We're running a program in our frontal lobes, which creates a specific sense of personal selfhood. And it's not fixed, it's expanding into ever more abstracted ideational layers. There are problems with doing this and psychology is neither recognising nor addressing this.
Yes, that is true. The strength of the nervous system and the weakness of the personal self is I think increasingly recognised.
But I still suspect that were psychology to collapse and something else start to take its place, people would do better. A lot of psych is really just middle class people endlessly navel gazing.
The main takeaway I have from psychology is it is one of those uncommon professions where the more you hear about it the less respect you have for it. Like I find IFS as described here legit embarrassing.
The thing with psychology is that it looks like it really should work on paper but, historically, studies tend to find it ineffective. Working as a therapist, I'm not totally against things like IFS. They have a place. But each new therapy rapidly descends into a cult, as happened with Hellinger's work a generation ago. You just get a mass of people, all preaching IFS to each other, like it's gonna take all their issues away.
I guess I should report negative results too: I don't have much experience with IFS but after reading your review I tried to look for my internal parts (I closed my eyes and thought "is anyone here?" and waited a bit for something to come to my mind spontaneously), but it was just quiet. When I explicitly tried to generate random stuff I got random funny sounding words like moist, numbers (usually primes), Shu'Azub the Hoarder of Souls, and random colors. Fwiw I don't think I'm very good at introspecting into my thought processes or communication in general, so, for me at least, the problem lies elsewhere.
A frame that is more of the work of Reggie Ray's somatic descent is to put your attention in the body, give it time to settle there and get comfortable, and then generate a greeting towards yourself, your sensations or your experience. Something like "hello there" or "greetings" and see if you get something interesting happening.
All this talk about fully formed "parts" leaves me pretty baffled as well, and yet something in the vicinity of this seems obviously true at the same time. Here's a quote from a Kaj Sotala's reddit comment: "Have you ever thought about doing something and then felt a slight unease about it and then quickly started thinking about something else? If you have, then you're already most of the way there. You just need to pay a bit more attention to that sense of unease that's already in your (normal waking) consciousness, and see if you'd get a feeling of what exactly about it is that's making you uncomfortable. (And an IFS therapist would phrase this as "ask the unease what it's worried about".)"
I don't see much to extract from the fact that sometimes people can think of solutions to problems that conflict with their own morals. This is basically just the observation that sometimes a moral code hurts you.
But here's a quote from Taran Wanderer:
> Was there the slimmest hope of saving the stricken herdsman? If not, even Prince Gwydion would not reproach Taran's decision. Nor would any man. Instead, they would grieve with him at his loss. Free of his burden, free of the valley, the door of his cage opened wide, and all his life awaited him; Eilonwy, Caer Dallben. He seemed to hear his own voice speak these words, and he listened with shame and horror.
If "parts" are actually behavioural suites that arise in response to situations, you wouldn't see them when you are doing nothing -- you need to observe yourself in action.
>When I explicitly tried to generate random stuff I got random funny sounding words like moist, numbers (usually primes), Shu'Azub the Hoarder of Souls, and random colors
If you were to build a shrine to Shu'Azub, what structural and aesthetic details would it need in order to be serviceable? What are the proper rites and offerings for such a place, and what boons or curses might result from performing them with excellence, or failing to do so? https://egypt.urnash.com/stella/
Hi Scott-appreciate the intellectual curiosity about this. I've found it a pretty useful modality. Not into therapy in general, but this specifically has helped me figure out a few things in my life. No trances involved.
The way I did it was: look at a situation when I felt wounded or hurt. In this case it was a sense of rejection. Investigate, "if I was going to personify that sense of self I was holding on to in that situation-what they looked like, acted like, when they were formed, what would they look like?"
Then ask, "what are they trying to defend? Where was this identity or sense of self (aka part) formed? Was it crafted at some point due to an inability to cope, or was it crafted as some sort of defense mechanism, etc?" You can then "ask it" directly, which doesnt feel much like a trance and feels more like an actor probing a part. "Okay I am given the part of Hamlet--Okay how do I feel, how do I look at the world? etc".
I wonder in your own writing of Unsong if you did some of this. What does this character feel or what would they say? Same mechanism. And you may find that those same characters are bits of your own parts :)
It really is Satan corrupting our minds to take us over.
No, it's not. But I feel that there are a lot of therapists out there, all being trained in subtly different ways in the [insert shiny new technique] depending on who their mentor/guru/wise old owl original teacher of the technique was, and how close that person is to the Originator Of All the technique.
So some people will be more hard-nosed, and then some people will be more hippy-dippy. And since there is no One True Way of doing the therapy, the ones who go full tilt for the Jungian shadow archetypes will go all the way there (and I like Jung's ideas, don't get me wrong, but it's as much philosophy or artistic creativity as about what is going on inside our heads).
And schools of everything - art, therapy, you name it - expand and diffuse and get weird accretions as time goes on and the idea spreads out geographically. So this is the sort of thing I'd expect, to be honest. It's *why* early Christianity was so hung up about definitions and what was or was not in the canon, all the later chin-stroking by liberal thinkers about "why did they burn each other at the stake over the position of an iota?" be damned.
Falconer is not the originator of IFS, but he studied at the feet of the guru and has been doing this for decades by now. He's clearly, by his website, moved on to "spiritual guidance" rather than just plain psychotherapy, and is now himself in guru/head lama/spiritual director mode.
So, yeah: we're not in talk therapy territory any more, this is climbing up Maslow's pyramid to the summit of self-actualisation.
>liberal thinkers about "why did they burn each other at the stake over the position of an iota?" be damned.
Is the intended conclusion from this line of thinking that they didn't have enough stake-burnings to avoid issues like "filioque", "sola scriptura", and certain royal divorces?
No, it's that "but it's just a teeny-tiny difference, can it really be that big a deal?" about "isn't it okay if some people find this sort of symbolic language useful for the technique?" then turns into "crikey, some of the people doing this believe their clients are actually possessed by actual demons and they need to actually exorcise them".
You got something there. I remember this from the physiotherapy culture. Smart enterpising people find out stuff that works, found a school, there's some hype about it, people learn the method, quite some of them are neither smart enough to do it right nor to see it's limits, it all mellows out.
I work with people using ifs. I'd strongly recommend Jay Earley's work for Rationalists as a systematic approach that is clear and has limited ideological bias.
Even among ifs practitioners there's different opinions on what's going on. I think fundamentally *it doesn't matter* other than it seems to work to help people.
Having said that here's a few ideas of what's going on.
In general we reify parts. One opinion is that we cut the psyche into a piece to work on it. A sentence like, "show me the part of myself that has confidence" has the agency in the cutting capacity.
Another option is that we *discover* parts. We go wandering around the landscape of our psyche and we find we have already split into parts. We then have some friendly reasoning conversations including compassion and understanding and parts relax their stubborn grip on their behaviour.
Another option is that we created the parts when traumatic things happened. In the therapy we go find the part that exists and then work with it.
For most people I've talked to, parts seem to go away after the session. A rare few people seem to be able to keep a part around, even on the time scale of years. I don't know why, usually these things want to relax and unify with the rest of the psyche.
In rare instances we seem to be able to inherit parts from our caregivers or environment. I've even encountered a "ghost" like part than went away after a conversation and some resolution of the ghosts issues. (no ideological promises here either)
Generally trying to form rules about the world from strange therapy moments is not good epistemics.
In narrative therapy or big mind, we can even create a part by name (for example they use "the controller" to set up some safety contexts for the person's psyche.)
Theres isn't one model of how to do ifs or one clear explanation of how it works. But I want to emphasise that it doesn't matter as long as it's helping people and not harming them.
Jay Earley's work invites the client to see ifs as operating down 4 channels. The visual, the auditory, the emotional and the physical somatic. Parts are accessed by these 4 channels. "what does the part look like?" "what is it saying?" etc.
We are using the internal visual canvas to connect to the part and work with it. Some people have more access to these channels and some parts just don't have information in all channels.
One fundamental thing about ifs is that the client accesses and manages the relationships with their own parts. The therapist acts as a guide for the client, rarely trying to contact the parts directly.
"can you ask the part, what is its job?" is a standard Jay Earley question.
It's not the therapist working with the part, it's the client. I think this frame helps a lot of things.
Richard Schwartz ifs works differently, it invites the client to put the part in a Room and observe from outside. If the client feels they are back in the room, they are instructed to leave the room again, sometimes separating out another part as they go. This also maintains a stable platform (of "self") for the therapeutic work. Again, it's different to Jay Earley work but they both "work" for different people.
I think there's ideological problems where people accidentally bring judgements in but having different frames will make it easier to find one where those judgements (or more specifically conflicting parts) cause less disruption to the work.
Seems to me that IFS is going through adaptive radiation, and your review caught it between the "therapist finds a neat approach that works well on some patients, tells therapist friends about it" and "the approach is optimized and everyone uses the same common guidelines to do IFS" stages. So maybe there are lots of small, related schools that all call themselves IFS and use Parts, but aren't exactly the same thing?
Imagine if we didn't have different names for individual butterfly clades. Entomologist Scott Alexander reads a book on nymphalids and says "hey, butterflies have four wings, they go through a caterpillar stage, they have a mating ritual where the male presses the female's antennae between his wings". Another entomologist who works on swallowtails comes along and says "huh, that's not exactly right, the wings and caterpillar thing is true but males engage in aerial mock combat instead". Then a third, who works on bagworms, is like "what are you talking about, butterflies don't have wings".
So some psychiatrists really go with the "okay, so the part of you who wants to sit around in darkness all day is shaped like a tunicate, because that's the first thing that came to your mind" approach, others really work with subconscious "modules" that you have to negotiate with (which sometimes call themselves demons), and still others really preface their sessions with "What I'm about to do has not been approved by the Vatican". Eventually some "best" method that fits most people will emerge, and everyone will go with that, but until then each therapist does whatever works with their patients?
I’ve never done IFS, but over the last few years, I have been influenced by the elephant-and-the-rider metaphor (that I learned from Jonathan Haidt’s writing, if I remember correctly, though I don’t know if it originated with him) for thinking about System 1 and System 2 processing. I think of my “elephant” as all of my automatic, spontaneously formed internal signals and reactions (System 1) and my “rider” as all of my deliberative, metacognitive internal signals and reactions (System 2).
I identify with both the rider and the elephant equally, and I even, sometimes (when I’m struggling to identify or resolve some difficult, usually affective state of affairs), do something I call “emotions writing,” in which elephant-Connor and rider-Connor talk, usually with the goal of non-judgementally investigating, sympathizing with, learning from, and (if needed) gently adjusting what elephant-Connor is going through.
I view this all as just a neat metaphor and a useful strategy, and, in fact, I see it all as based on a somewhat wrong model of the mind (in the sense that “all models are wrong, but some are useful,” at the very least). In any case, I find this metaphor and strategy to be profoundly useful! It helps me to regulate, adjust, and resolve my feelings, while also helping me to learn from them about those people, places, things, and cognitive patterns that are “right” for me (in the sense that they increase elephant- and rider-Connor’s sense of subjective wellbeing and make them more resilient to life’s inevitable setbacks and pitfalls).
It’s not quite IFS, but I see it all as IFS-adjacent … even though my BS-alarms are usually ringing around most of the IFS stuff I have read about … and now about the demons. I think that the devil (or the demon) can be in the details when it comes to this stuff: I implicitly conceptualize my elephant and rider in certain ways that affect how those conversations between them go, I have a very existentially nihilistic worldview that makes my rider particularly non-judgmental of my elephant, I strongly value subjective well-being and resilience, which guides the implicit goals of the conversations between my elephant and rider, etc. etc.
I think that a lot of these therapies crash upon the shoals of mental details: implicit assumptions, values, goals, worldviews, etc. that end up dictating the actual direction and effectiveness of the clinical intervention. If I, for example, used a different metaphor for System 1 and System 2 (eg snake and a snake-charmer), if I had strong religious views that reified and justified my negative self-judgements, and if I valued something far less obviously subjective (like environmental conservation), then I imagine that these metaphors and strategies would lead to very different psychological outcomes.
I find the "elephant and the rider" metaphor as too self-serving and flattering for the "rider". Haidt also has a "press secretary" metaphor, where your conscious self's actual job is to find justifications for whatever the "elephant" decides to do, which is suitably cynical and nihilistic for my taste.
But also obviously and demonstrably wrong. I can with clear and unambiguous forethought decide to do something, like clap my hands, or say words out loud, or move my fingers to type words on my keyboard, and then my body does it. I can decide to do this minutes, hours, or even days in advance, and then, barring some sort of event preventing me from doing so or causing me to change my mind, my body will obey and do it. It's only the minor and repetitive details that I'm not paying attention to, like breathing or walking, that happen automatically without conscious thought and pre-planning.
Unless you're making the claim that somehow my "subconscious" is making plans in advance such as what to type or when to go grocery shopping tomorrow, in which case redefine that part as "me" because that's the part that's conscious and talking to you right now. Regardless, the elephant and the rider seems way more accurate, given that the rider does actually have significant control and the ability to override things when it chooses to.
>my "subconscious" is making plans in advance such as what to type or when to go grocery shopping tomorrow
I'd rather put that it pre-approves them. Subconsciousness decides what arises to the level of conscious awareness, and lets "you" "choose" the brand of cereal or whatever. Of course, since "we" can only think the thoughts that are supplied to "us", the illusion of near-total control is pretty thorough, so that few even consider questioning it.
Perhaps a better metaphor would be a company with a hundred employees and a boss/manager. The employees run around doing the actual work, the routine operations, and responding to issues that arise that are considered within their jurisdiction. Then when a major decision arises it's brought before the boss's attention and he chooses. And makes the long term plans and agendas for production quotas and goals and marketing or whatever, which are then delegated and translated into bits and pieces to the employees.
From a certain perspective the boss is "in control", in that he makes decisions and then people usually obey them, but from another perspective the employees are "in control" in that they literally physically do everything, if they don't like something the boss says they can just refuse to do it, and don't even have to tell him. But the boss still has agency, he still makes the big decisions, at least the ones he has time for given his busy schedule. He's not just a PR spokesman with no input: he's the boss.
no, your subconscious isn’t making plans in advance. your subconscious is made up of a myriad of automatic, tacit sensory, memory, motor, cognitive, and affective responses and processes that, by simultaneously activating and interacting, lead to the emergent effects that are your thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and consciousness.
the elephant and the rider is, for me, just a metaphor for reflecting on these responses and processes, learning from them, learning about them, and influencing them when i can.
For what it's worth, I found IFS to be a powerful modality for myself. As somebody else noted, it was analogous to my experience with focusing where I got access to parts of myself that are normally repressed or suppressed. I wouldn't describe it as a trance, although I'll note I can't generally access my parts on my own through reflection; having somebody else guide me through the process seems critical.
The IFS approach I experienced wasn't the Schwartz one with very specific roles, but was more oriented towards discovering the rationale behind seemingly illogical behaviors. Once we made contact with a part, we would ask questions like "What are you trying to do?" or "What do you fear will happen if you stop working so hard to prevent it?" I found this perspective very helpful to discover how parts of myself had agendas that were good in principle, but were undermining my conscious intentions in practice. In that sense, I see parts as an extension of Kegan and Lahey's Immunity to Change methodology , with irs approach to discovering "unconscious commitments".
"Works in different ways in different people" sounds right. IME, there's quite a bit of variation in what people's IFS sessions are like. With some you get a session that's basically right out of an IFS book, whereas with others you can recognize some of the same basic patterns, but none of the parts are anthropomorphized or anything like that.
I'll also copy over what I wrote in the Reddit thread:
When doing IFS, some of my clients go into trance-like states and some don't. When I'm the client, I go into such a state much more often than not, but definitely not always.
I think it's a little misleading to say that the therapist is intentionally putting people into such a state. It's not that it would involve an explicit hypnotic induction or anything like that (though there's a lot of hypnotherapy that works with parts, so one can do it that way, even if it's not the IFS way). Rather I'd compare it with the way that some people slip into a really immersed state when creating or consuming fiction. If you focus your attention on something that causes your mind to generate new content, then you might naturally fall into a state that's very focused on that mind-generated content and tuned out of the actual physical reality around you. But the extent to which people do this varies, and it's also perfectly possible to read or write a story without getting strongly immersed in it.
I'd say that pretty much exactly the same happens with parts work. I don't try to explicitly induce a trance state with my clients, any more than a book tries to hypnotize you when you open it. But when reading a book, some people go into a trance/engrossment state of some intensity anyway, depending on their personality and other factors like how distracting their environment is. And likewise, when some - but not all - people close their eyes and start focusing on subtle details of their emotional experience, their focus on those details pulls them into the same kind of a trance/absorption state.
Then again, I do generally try to shift their attention toward their emotions and feelings rather than intellectual theorizing. And a stronger connection with their emotions and feelings tends to involve more absorption in that experience. If someone is in such a state, I generally do want to keep them in it because it makes all of the work that much more effective, so I'm likely to modulate my style of speaking and so forth in a way that supports them staying there. So while I'm not explicitly trying to put them into a trance state, I do do things that are conducive for them going and staying there. But it's also totally possible for me to work with them if they don't go there!
I think self-awareness, as an agent, may end up requiring you to constitute yourself as recursive network of subagents.
Even if you just have a utility function - instead of some grab bag of animal drives - you still have instrumental rationality to deal with. Instrumental rationality itself contains a bunch of subgoals, all of which are at odds in the sense that we have scarcity to deal with and need to evaluate tradeoffs everywhere.
So perhaps any agent, with a goal, and the ability to represent itself, has to represent itself as as _collection_ of subagents, one for each subgoal, convergent or otherwise.
The idea 'individual personalities' then makes more sense if you see personas as a 'mask', or an 'interface to an agent'. If our minds contain recursive agent-like representations of ourselves for each subgoal we have, then this all fits together nicely.
What I've noticed via meditation (and using IFS) is that the feeling of 'this is me' can attach to more or less arbitrary voices, and 'make them speak'. Their thoughts seem to echo around in the mind for a while, and sometimes they argue with each other. What I've been doing lately, to positive effect, is treating them all with love, and when they are upset and pushing for some immediate action, asking them what they'd rather be doing as their job instead.
Or... it's just a fancy name for "brainwashing." Isn't this also the same basic technique used in getting people to join cults and religions, etc. and to abandon more reason/logic/evidence-based ways of thinking in favor of any number of other philosophies? The fact it is done in the name of healing psychological wounds also is not so different. That is often the line used in recruiting for a cult or a religion.
I don't mean to be overly broad in critiquing all of psychology this way. I'm simply comparing the techniques and noting a striking similarity: identifying internal emotional and cognitive patterns as a personality/agent/entity and then giving it power.
Good outcomes are possible. And bad outcomes, as well. It is just a tool, after all, and any tool can be used for good or ill. My point is that the basic technique seems strikingly similar. Or am I missing something?
But brainwashing doesn't actually work. The cult playbook is isolating people from the rest of society and making them dependent of the cult's infrastructure, the mouthing of whatever bullshit dogma isn't the important part.
I'm not familiar with the cult recruiting techniques you mention so can't compare them, but this bit stuck out to me:
> identifying internal emotional and cognitive patterns as a personality/agent/entity and then giving it power.
I don't know if I'd describe IFS as "giving power" to any pattern. If the client comes to therapy because they experience a pattern within them as problematic, then that pattern already has power over the person. IFS just offers a way to interface with that pattern, often in a way that _reduces_ its power over that person.
Negotiating with the pattern does seem like giving it power - if the therapist directs the patient to negotiate, instead of ignoring it or fighting it, that seems like moving in the direction of giving it power.
I’ve been assuming the parts of IFS are the schemas of memory reconsolidation and coherence therapy.
I’ve practiced an memory reconsolidation technique for a cumulative ~700 hours now to repair a total lack of childhood attachment. I started off with MDMA therapy and then after a while of that realized I had trained my mind to do the same process any time I wanted with no medicine. In all this time I’ve never encountered any metaphorical projections or interpretations of anything in my subconscious. All the schemas I encounter and rewrite are somewhat straightforward after I make them explicit. For example, I may notice intense fear and a belief that “I’m bad” (sometimes spontaneously vocalized in my mind) when talking to someone. Then after a bit of reconsolidation I realize the person had a facial/vocal expression of judgment. That was a trigger for the “I’m bad” schema that helped me anticipate and avoid or rationalize the bad moods and actions of my parents. There are never any demons, etc.
With no intended disrespect, to me there is an irony (word choice?) to someone who donated their left kidney and is also prone to these kind of posts ans situations. I don't think I can put it to words for this blog without significant effort. I think most would benefit from exploring themselves physically and without words, then listening to what fills the nothing. The rest has always varied and will always vary... the debates are moot beyond the individuals own understanding. At this point, my next reflection is to move onto more passive reading 🤷♂️
This is starting to sound a bit like the aphantasia discussion.
Like, I, personally, can visualize things and can even overlay a mental visualization on top of what i'm actually looking at. And people with aphantasia listen to these kind of descriptions, and go: what the hell? you people can visualize stuff?
So, maybe there's something like that going on, where some people are really seeing Sabby the Serpent, and the rest of us with just normal (for a high functioning autistic) levels of hyperphantasic visualisation are going what the hell? you people actually saw Sabby the Serpent?
Yes, indeed. Same level of differentness, but at right angles. I wish that Scott and Dr. Schwartz both could read this little comment I'm about to write, but instead I'll settle for a low-probability of the former reading it.
So. First thing: in my experience (but in zero IFS literature) those who are a little bit self-identified 'autistic'* or "on the spectrum' appear to have vastly fewer 'parts' in an IFS sense, and appear to be very stable in what parts are active (and how much). This is part of their strength -- there's too little buy-in from all the members of a standard inner team to sit down and e.g. work in Haskell for 10 straight hours for an important deadline. For most of us, someone would revolt (or probably most of the someones). But to such a person, IFS seems like mumbo-jumbo gibberish. It's truly remarkable that Scott is open-minded enough to still be hanging in there with this discourse given his inner experience. (*Note the scare-quotes. I'm not claiming that actual diagnosable autism symptoms are inversely proportionate to IFS, just talking about the vibe. It's probably just a spectrum of 'how many parts do you have' with 'spergy' folks like Scott and Robin Hanson on one side and people with a ton, those who were traumatized as children now also having Borderline Personality Disorder).
Second thing: Dr. Schwartz has aphantasia, but appears not to have heard the term. His descriptions of his inner (lack of experience) of IFS parts (he only hears them, can't see them, it's dark in his inner therapy room) match perfectly the experiences of those who have aphantasia and fruitfully do IFS work. Having a lot of parts has nothing to do with visual imagination, and vice versa.
Bonus thing: people with hyperphantasia AND lots of parts, even if not traumatized as children seem to really struggle for unity in a sense that Scott would recognize as having-a-unified-personality, and also go in for 'woo' stuff at a gigantic rate. They also, again in my experience, have a tendency to get distracted by internal content and have a HARDER time with IFS. Their inner content also seems less tractable and more 'real' (beyond being more vivid), and ones who are a little bit borderline and don't know it almost certainly experience some inner phenomena as demons.
I've been thinking about my autism and parts-of-self and I agree with you. I would say that the natural autistic tendency is to create a low number (ideally 1) of very complicated simulations of reality, while the allistic tendency is to create a larger number of simpler simulations and naturally switch between/merge those versions of reality simulation based on the context. This matches with the fact that autistic people have a lot of trouble with understanding context, tend to use binary thinking (because there is only one version of reality), and can be good with details.
My parents divorced at 4 and quickly remarried and my house and parents changed every few days, so it was not possible for me to create a single simulation of reality. I definitely have multiple personalities, but they're all aware of each other and identify as the same "person". Trauma probably makes it harder for different personalities/versions of self to coexist in our head, which can cause dissociative identity disorder or borderline symptoms.
I learned how to be different versions of myself quite early, and have always been interested in many different things instead of hyper fixating on a single topic. So, even though I don't have any of the deep trance-like experiences described for IFS, I do naturally think of myself as being composed of different parts that are utilized in different configurations depending on the context. But, for someone who had different experiences growing up that allowed them to be the "same person", they may be less aware of their components. Scott (and most people who get into Psychology) seems to be quite aware of his components.
Hyperphantasia appears to make it harder to resist trauma -- those with vivid imaginations are reliving (or pre-living) all kinds of awful stuff. It was a kind of copernican revolution for me when I realized that; suddenly it made sense why folks seem so trapped in the hurtful past or anxious future: those are actually happening to them right now.
I'm not autistic, but I am a software engineer, which is probably pretty close to the "vibe". (I score in the normal range on autism tests, leave the tags on my clothes, have a reputation for disappearing at parties to go talk to strangers, etc. but I also play Factorio and use Emacs.)
For me it's less that there are only one or two parts, and more that the only thing that could be called a "part" is just one big malleable ball of clay, or ocean, or something else metaphorical that doesn't fully represent the reality because it's really just a big old brain. There's no long-lived "part" that says it's upset my grandma died: part of my mind is dealing with that now, but in an hour it won't be the same part, and might not even exist. Splitting off different parts of the whole based on which signal they're dealing with so I can turn them on or off seems to me to be confusing the input with the processing, and feels like it might do something unpleasant to the way I think; perhaps I wouldn't be able to stop thinking about negative things as quickly if I gave them cute names and tried to reify them as parts of my mind.
And yes, your description meshes well with what I've heard from men who would self-identify similarly. For the record, that's utterly unrelatable to me -- my parts are so dissimilar that you can see which one is uppermost from my body language, and I couldn't possibly mix them up internally.
I used to hang around on sff.net (now sadly closed) where a lot of fiction authors had their own discussion groups. Occasionally one of them would start talking about how one of their characters was arguing with them about the story, or refusing to 'do' the thing that they believe needs to happen in order to advance the plot. Any they really meant that the character seemed to them to have an independent existence. This seems to be a common experience for fiction authors. Some would say that they avoided discussing this in public (sff.net was public but felt like a personal space) lest they be thought mad.
So the ability for the brain to support 'independent characters' seems to be one of the optional mental faculties. In the case of authors, they don't as far as I know seem to have any concern that these characters can affect their personal life or decisions (other than maybe screwing up the current book). Which makes me wonder if this is related to 'parts' or not. I think that the authors would be uncomfortable with the idea, just as they are uncomfortable with thinking that it might be related to multiple personality disorder. And yet, it seems unreasonable for the brain to have two such facilities for simulation of different personalities. I suppose we'd have to find an author who had done IFS (or had multiple personality disorder) to find out.
I don't have any experience with IFS, but I think the invent/discover dichotomy is eliding some subtleties about how imagination tends to work that might explain the confusion. I'm a bit like you here, I think: if you ask me to make something up to represent my anxiety, I'll probably do it consciously and not take it that seriously. If you ask me to "reach deep inside my true self and discover the hidden form" of my anxiety, I'll probably just come up empty and feel awkward about it.
But let's say you start with something specific and easy. You tell me to imagine myself wandering a space that represents my mind. You get me to imagine the walls, the furniture, the lighting - nothing that matters, just stuff that makes the scene more vivid in my mind. Then, whenever any of my "parts" enter the picture, I think I'll end up giving them an appearance without any prompting or conscious effort, just because *not* doing that would be dissonant with the rest of the scene.
I still don't think I'd take it *that* seriously, personally, but it would feel more real than just "making something up", and maybe people who don't already daydream all the time would treat it with more gravitas.
Now that I think about it, this might explain the demon thing too. If your therapist tells you to ask your trauma why it's behaving the way it is, and you can't come up with anything, but you're so immersed in this fictional world you've spun up that your brain won't even consider "I don't know" as a response... what else are you going to say?
In my opinion, what's going on is that deep processes don't have any "natural" symbolism. They certainly don't have words in English attached. But to deal with them in consciousness, you need to access them via a translation area. Perhaps the visual or auditory (cortex?). So what the claim is (or should be) is that you are discovering a part of your mind, rather than inventing it. But is sounds as if they are ignoring the translation layer. The "built-in" parts CANNOT speak any "language", but they can speak to the routines that the language is implemented in. And for consciousness those are largely auditory and visual symbols with a few kinesthetic punctuation marks.
As for the parts...certainly one can create a part with some degree of power just by focusing attention on it. You don't need a trance state to do that, though it does speed up the process. You don't need to calculate what the symbol should look like, and that may be an inferior approach. (I've run into lots of arguments about that, with each side being certain that they were correct.) OTOH, a well chosen symbol certain can speed up the process.
FWIW, I've been trying to create "a magic talent", specifically a visual image of a green line that will represent the direction that I should move. It hasn't been working very well, because what wants to appear is a kinesthetic "gut feeling". So an "improperly" chosen symbol can slow things down. But if I can manage it, the visual green line should convey clearer information to consciousness.
I wonder how much it would help to make a Sabby the Serpent plushie and like burn it or bury it when you get rid of it/purify it. Maybe that helps if you don't have much imagination, and is part of the explanations for some rituals and why some worked.
I have written fiction my whole life as a sort of private, self-therapy exercise. It's like journaling, but I exaggerate what happened to the point that it doesn't reflect the real world anymore, and for some reason this gives me clarity about actual events (perhaps sorting out what I feel happened from what actually did happen). Sometimes I take an entry and run with it for a month.
I've always thought it was curious that the voices of characters just emerge in my mind and speak for themselves. I don't have to labor over the idea of "what would X character say," their words just pop into my mind as part of a full conversation. Characters also seem to have a mind of their own. I can be intending to write about a certain action a character might take, only to get to that place and realize that the character is going to do something else. Again, I don't have to think about it deeply, it just flows naturally from the character I'm imagining and seems to make sense.
In my day to day life I don't perceive myself to be made of pieces rather than an integrated whole. But writing and imaging characters accesses that. I never believe that the characters I write are real in any sense.
I wonder how other creatives are connected to the characters they write?
I don't remember the source, but I vaguely remember reading that Charles Dickens had (what today, we'd probably recognize as) tulpas of his fictional characters. So it's probably not uncommon among creatives.
I first encountered what I realized later was IFS back when I was first seeing a therapist and she asked me to talk to the 7 year old version of myself (where she felt I had experienced my earliest trauma). At the time, I thought it was silly and I felt incredibly self-conscious but went through with the exercise. No trance or hypnotic state - just me having an awkward conversation with 7-year old me (as I remembered me to be) in front of the therapist. I was definitely rolling my eyes on the inside when I left.
A month later, I was talking to my then-wife that I had learned my trauma had started much younger than I had long thought, and in thinking about that 7 year old version of me, I burst out crying on this topic unexpectedly and for the first time. I realized that I could never cry for the adult version of me, but when I thought about this vulnerable 7 year old boy, I could cry for him and his deap-seated fears.
I'm a rational person who processes emotions intellectually before I feel them, but I've come to believe this pathway tricked my brain into getting permission to start processing that long-buried pain by seeing it as "other" rather than me (with all of my long-established defense mechanisms).
Odd. I am yet to engage in good faith negotiations with any snake, unless you count "get out of here or I will kill you!" as a sort of good faith negotiation.
(I’m thinking of YouTube videos of cats absolutely freaking out when presented with a cucumber. One hypothesis is that the cat’s instinctive reaction is cucumber = snake.)
It seems possible to me that IFS is a generally normal and sane practice more in line with what commenters have described, and a few loonies and con men built a crazy cultish version on top of its reputation and central metaphor for personal gain and interpersonal power.
This comes down to the eternally boring quesiton of what 'real' IFS is, which means we should probably taboo the term for the discussion. It sounds like the commenters and the book are describing two related but importantly different things using the same term; we can just acknowledge that these are two different things that don't have to be at all consistent with each other.
Just in case this is helpful, here is how IFS works from a first person perspective. I am an engineer and generally a practical man not especially prone to woo. I state this up front in the hopes that it will help you take the following literally:
1. Start with something that upsets you.
2. Do Focusing to find an imagistic handle for it. You will “know” when you have found it because the feeling in your body changes. This is distinct and unambiguous and does not occur in the imagination.
3. Interact with the imagistic handle, which is the Part. The dialog is partly verbal, partly a flickering of images back and forth. It does not feel like I am playing the role of the Part in this dialog. It feels like the Part is an entity.
4. Iff you are engaging with the part with the correct emotional stance (“from Self” in the parlance) it will be very easy to figure out what the Part wants, where it comes from, and how to make it feel better. Once you do this you will feel another shift in your body. This is also not in the imagination.
You do this whenever you feel really strong emotions, especially ones that you don’t fully understand. This makes the feelings permanently better. After a few months of years of doing this as-needed, you end up permanently happier.
I frame it this way because I think the “what it’s actually like and what it actually is” gets lost in the “how it’s supposed to work” and the philosophical questions about what’s really happening. I am also curious about the ontological status of Parts but simultaneously do not really care how it works since I simply observe that it does.
How do you know these “feelings” are not just in the imagination? Actually what does that mean to you? They seem obviously psychosomatic, and like, that’s not bad
In a meaningful sense, every sensation is “just in the mind” anyway, so it’s probably a made-up distinction. That said, I don’t typically have any ability to change the way my body feels using my intent. If I imagine a sensation, that is a very abstract operation and totally unlike actually feeling something. So when I say I am really feeling a change it is much more like feeling someone touching my arm than it is like imagining what it would feel like to have someone touch my arm.
Seems pretty likely that if anyone involved in IFS has ever worked with altered states or trances, the dude writing a book about demon possession would emphasize it.
Besides your IFS post, I've recently also been reading your "The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind", "Crazy Like Us"and "The Geography Of Madness" posts. I find that all of these show that our interpretation, or rather, constitution of reality at some level (at which level exactly?) to an extent depend on the influence culture exerts on us- big deal, old news.
The most interesting (and most impossible) question seems to be what the schema/innate capacity/mechanism which governs the capacity for understanding our own theory of mind and the constitution of our reality is (ontological q) and to what extent can we gain knowledge of this by reflecting on it (epistemological q).
An attempt that comes to mind is one by the French anthropologist Philippe Descola, who proposed that individuals in different cultures perform a different process of 'worlding', constituting the world at an ontological level; and that there are transformations obeying logical laws (which can be grasped by our reason) describing the change from one to the other process of ontological worlding (out of the 4 Descola proposes) - all of this in his book "Beyond Nature and Culture".
Descola has some glaring issues with his approach, but I am not that familiar with his work so I don't want to draw any conclusions prematurely.
I want to ask does anybody else know any theoretical approaches which neatly contextualize these phenomena of constructing one's reality and help us understand this better, or maybe have more examples which may guide the investigation? Possibly something that might allow for an elegant circumvention of the nature/culture trope.
Interesting pointer. Checking out the book now. I guessed there was ethnomethodology overlap and it turns out Descola is of an anthropology background.
Yeah, he's a French-stylr anthropologist meaning he has a solid background inphilosophy as well. I'm interested if you have any ethnological pointers to share yourself
Somewhat tangential, but I think the same trance like state of introspection also sometimes happens in deep emotional conversations where you're e.g. processing something painful with an empathetic friend. I've had a few such conversations with a particular pattern of attributes: a feeling of things being very raw and exposed, several hours of time passing almost instantaneously, not remembering any of the details afterwards but feeling abstractly much closer to the person, and some kind of painful emotional thing changing states, as though important processing has occurred.
My model is that there is a process for cracking open one's emotions, moving one's consciousness into a different circuit of the brain and it manifests as a sort of trance.
I have significant experience with IFS from both sides. Clients tend to ride the imaginary highway because they think Parts are just some patterns of their thoughts. But Parts are actually very somatic so I when in doubt I ask my client about physical sensations they have at the moment. Heart meditation, attuned touch (clients generally only have to touch themselves) and breathing are all useful for this. I always check when I get the impression that client is fused with a protective Part that uses quick and rich imaginary sequences or compicated rationalisations to distract this client and control the risk of contact with burdened Exiles. So I usually stop doing what I did and time to help client notice this protective Part, get in touch with it, learn more about it.
My guess, from reading this and his other essays, is that in Scott's world, there is a very sharp boundary between the conscious and the unconscious. From that standpoint, this kind of imaginal work could only happen either in the unconscious realm -- as a special "trance" state -- or in the conscious realm -- but then you're basically just "making things up", and nothing really surprising is going to happen.
But I think the whole point of modalities like IFS and Focusing is to facilitate more fluid back-and-forth between the conscious and the unconscious. If someone isn't open to that, then I don't think these modalities are going to be useful.
Furthermore, the sharpness of this conscious / unconscious divide is something that varies a lot between people, and I think for most people, it's not nearly so sharp.
And relatedly,
>But even if some other people have so little access to their mental processes that complex metaphors burst into their mind fully formed
It's not about them having less access to their mental processes, it's about them letting those processes unfold more before collapsing them into something intelligible to the conscious mind (like words or clear images).
IFS did not work well for me because I don't really think of my family or internal self that way, but after talking to the therapist I realized it was more about talking to a different version of MYSELF instead of trying to talk to some archetype or family member. This makes sense from a cognitive psychology standpoint because the brain is constantly simulating different versions of reality and naturally switches between them based on the context. One of the main roles of consciousness is to write a narrative where you are "the same person" throughout, but that is mostly a lie. My parents divorced when I was young and I swapped parents on the weekend so there are definitely two different versions of who I was at 7 years old. I even had different food preferences depending on which house I was at. I do think that IFS falls apart when it starts talking about the "core self" because that is mostly a narrative fiction (and one that does not seem to exist outside of western philosophy).
Our brains are constantly running parallel simulations of what could happen in the future, and we often end up simulating the thoughts of people who are close to us. This is important because predicting the thoughts and actions of other people is vital to survival as humans. Most conversations with friends/family would be completely impossible without this deep simulation, as you would need to establish everything from first principles every time which would take forever. But humans are actually quite good at mind-reading, and we constantly create simulated models of other people inside our head. So, in something like IFS you are having a conversation with one of those simulated people. Every conversation you ever have is already with a simulation that merges prior beliefs with some new information from the actual person, so it's not crazy to have a conversation with entirely simulated people.
I'm not a therapist; I've been using IFS, Voice Dialogue, and similar methods for about 30 year, on my own, as a facilitator of groups, and in groups facilitated by others.
I believe that at the root of success in IFS, and perhaps most forms of therapy, is bringing into consciousness difficult or painful cognitions which were not previously in awareness, and changing those cognitions and their sources. My belief is that people vary quite a bit in their paths to accessing those cognitions. In the IFS context, different people are going to have access to these "parts" in different ways, just as some people can totally "get lost in a book" or "lost in a movie" and momentarily feel like they're really in that reality, while others are like "nice images and sounds, I like the story" but don't feel immersed in the same way, and still others are in between.
To my mind, it's all in service of accessing those non-conscious cognitions. Obviously, "official" IFS wants to have very reified parts, with exiles, managers, and firefighters. I think some people are going to experience those parts as reasonably real in the same way that a character in a movie is experienced as real. They may or may not believe that the part is existentially real, and I'm not sure that's important--what's important is accessing the submerged cognitions.
When Scott says, "is it some more complicated place where things happen independent of your "conscious will"", my experience is that people are often surprised by what is communicated to them by an IFS part, so perhaps that is helpful.
Overall, I think a useful metaphor is that of the person or personality as being like a house with many rooms and different people living in the rooms. Sometimes when you knock on the door, the Dad answers. Other times it's the Kid, or the Cook, or the Maid, or the Gardener, etc. Usually the different people know about each other, but sometimes they do not. I really don't think it's important whether that's a metaphor (as I think it largely is) or whether it's existential reality (which I think it largely is not. What's important is helping people have access to these sub-surface cognitions, and to work with them in ways that help people have more functional experiences and lives.
I think the "dream-like-state" described in those articles, knowingly or unknowingly, probably refers to Jung's ~1916 meditative practice of "active imagination." Robert A. Johnson (a Jungian analyst himself) describes how to apply this technique in his 1989 book "Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth." Demons and snakes are, of course, Jungian archetypes - possibly why they appear in some clients' imaginations and in some IFS practitioners' toolkits. However, neither active imagination nor dream interpretation require the inclusion of archetypes.
Disclaimer: I'm not a therapist. I've read a lot and experienced a number of different types of therapy, some fairly niche.
From my perspective the mental health field is undergoing a moderately quiet revolution in re-discovering that we need to learn to self-regulate our nervous systems as well as learning/creating healthier perspectives about our experiences. Traumatologist Dr. John Briere has said, "If Complex PTSD were ever given its due (...) the DSM would shrink to the size of a small pamphlet.” I'm excited to see that happen. More practitioners are trauma-informed, and at least a few are re-discovering that creating and providing liminal healing experiences can be highly effective.
My (I feel, earned) opinion is that we collectively know everything we need to know to make the mental health/healing journey much quicker and much more effective. The future's already here (blah, blah) if you have the money, in which case the biggest challenge is acting on the responsibility that 90% of what we get out of a purposeful mental health journey happens from the work we put in between sessions.
I came to IFS part-way through a serious meditation practice, and it seemed ridiculous to reify new parts when even the existing self is losing solidity. I think a decent heuristic is that the parts are very dumb, like less complex than a 3 year old. Also the more of them are working at once, the stupider the interactions will be, ie tending towards some blunt result like inaction. Over time, I stopped working in terms of parts and started working in terms of habitual reaction, or samskaras in Buddhist terminology.
Having experienced both, there is a definite continuum between the state of shamanic trance and the state required to access internal parts- accessing internal parts is one of the main points of shamanic trance. My experience of a similar process to IFS- which I usually do for accessing information about other people rather than accessing information about my own unconscious - is that a picture pops into my mind fully formed, and by talking out loud about the picture, certain aspects of the picture will zoom in or change and more will reveal itself, and the picture will eventually turn out to be a metaphor for some aspect of their life (this seems to work pretty well in general; I have lots of mirror neurons or something.) But the talking out loud is the critical part - without talking about it to see what the image means, it's just a random image of a hole in the ground or whatever.
I suspect that in Scott's case, he likes explanations so much and he's so verbally fluent that his rational/verbal mind engages with and explains away the input from his subconscious as soon as it arises, which makes it feel like he isn't accessing his subconscious at all. No idea whether the IFS is less useful when it doesn't feel like a "trance" because your conscious mind wants to pretend it's controlling the process. But it might be a good idea for anyone who experiences the same to lean in to the sense that you're obviously making it all up, and approach it in the spirit of a kid playing pretend games, rather than as an adult investigating. That way probably leaves more room for something unexpected to surface.
I have some vague folk-psych idea of what it's supposed to be, but can't really define it. If someone argues about whether some person is or isn't in a "trance" then I don't know what to say because I am not sure what we are talking about exactly.
I've heard hypnotists and NLP guys use the term too, and my impression is that the mental state isn't as intense(?) as Hollywood would have you believe. It sounds like it just means that you're kinda spaced out, daydreaming, or going through the motions. Maybe a little confused.
The algorithm served me this recently, so it's at the top of my mind:
> DERREN BROWN UP TO HIS OLD TRICKS - A Neurological Linguistic Analysis- Pt. 1
and here's wikipedia:
> Wier, in his 1995 book, Trance: from magic to technology, defines a simple trance (p. 58) as a state of mind being caused by cognitive loops where a cognitive object (a thought, an image, a sound, an intentional action) repeats long enough to result in various sets of disabled cognitive functions. Wier represents all trances (which include sleep and watching television) as taking place on a dissociated trance plane where at least some cognitive functions such as volition are disabled; as is seen in what is typically termed a 'hypnotic trance'.[2] With this definition, meditation, hypnosis, addictions and charisma are seen as being trance states. In Wier's 2007 book, The Way of Trance, he elaborates on these forms, adds ecstasy as an additional form and discusses the ethical implications of his model, including magic and government use which he terms "trance abuse".
"Possibly [a person who finds they can’t do IFS] is either worse at actions like trusting input from outside of active consciousness or much better at observing their thought processes "
I just want to offer that porosity of mind, which Falconer refers to, seems like helpful framing here. Nondual meditators, intuitive people, highly sensitive people, etc., all subjectively know the feeling of a porous mind. This probably relates to the openness trait in the big five? "Real IFS" happens when the mind is porous. This does not need to be a trance state.
When the mind is closed and the "active consciousness" takes over, parts work is either impossible or is a product of the imagination. So helping clients develop a porous mind would be a good idea for any IFS practitioner.
Personally, I have very limited visual imagination. My parts work is mainly energetic, or kinesthetic, and is accompanied by warmth in the chest and a general feeling of openness and receptivity. It does help to orient to experience as if one were orienting to a loved one. Hope that helps
Maybe the active ingredients are the therapist'd warmth, congruence and empathy, and identifying innner parts, etc., is mostly an interesting activity therapist and patient engage in together that's plausible enough to feel legit.
What really strikes me about this is what it suggests about how seriously we should take other forms of clinical experience. For instance, how much confidence should we derive from the fact that doctors have much more confidence in the effectiveness of anti-depressants than indicated by the RCT trials?
I'm not trying to revive the ghost of Irving Kirsch (sp?) -- I do wonder how/if we can distinguish regression to the mean as a result of perturbation and direct treatment of depression -- as my sense is that these drugs have been found via later studies to be more effective than Kirsch thought, but the next time this kind of thing comes up how much should we trust clinical experience?
And that's true whatever interpretation you believe, some clinical caregivers are very sure of a very wrong interpretation.
Sorry if this has already been discussed, or for not jumping in the right point: I tend to just read Scott's articles, and when I think "I would want to chime in", the conversation tends to be already quite daunting, and I give up.
This time, I will try, because I am pretty involved in this.
I practice IFS, in the sense that I offer IFS sessions, and IFS-flavored coaching session, I have a "Level 1" training, together with my partner (Level 3 and Certified in IFS) co-created an company offering IFS sessions (IFS Collective), and we organize an online (free) Parts Work Unconference that is very IFS related (https://www.ifs-collective.com/unconference, next one, the 7th or so, happening this Saturday, as a coincidence).
I use it as a tool. I like it. I find it useful.
The thing is, I am not a True Believer. I come from around 20 years of Buddhist adjacent meditation (with lots of jhana and vipassana experience), Focusing, a lot of facilitating. I had friends pointing me to IFS several times, and always bounced, above all with the idea of Self (Buddhism tends to be big on "no self" and "nothing is indestructible").
A few years ago, during a very traumatic period, it clicked.
It gave some tools that were missing, above all to explore perceived causes of behaviors, and above all, for me, to offer myself compassion.
As I tend to tell it: giving myself compassion and acceptance as a whole did not work, I knew how much I could mess up. But giving it piecewise, to the part of me that felt like that, that worked.
I consider myself quite heretical:
the way I see it, part exists when we talk to them.
(This is taken from Deity practice, "do Tantric Gods exist?" "they think they do")
I strongly suspect that it is like talking to a tree, reading tarots, looking at clouds. As humans, we tend to anthropomorphize: "what does the economy want?", "freedom wants to be free", "the electrons want to...", and we can use it with our own tendencies, giving them the control of the language part.
Trance is not necessary, even if I have a very liberal attitude to trance (watching a movie is a form of trance, most meditations are, a conversation is, etc): we ask questions, and listen to what comes back. We check how we feel about something, and if there is any judgment/anger/contraction, we address it.
Rince, repeat.
That gets to some sort of anti-trance, "equanimity ñana", spaciosness, after a while. "More Self energy". Being open to listen.
It is the same with people: when we actually listen and approach them with curiosity, things can flow.
We can even end up changing roles/sides, as good Bayesians should do.
And what I noticed is that the same happens to part of myself. Maybe because they got crystallized when I was younger, or maybe just because they do not have the full picture: being first respected and listened, THEN engaged with, works best.
When someone goes "ah, that makes sense", something relaxes, shifts. Same inside, when we go "ah... that makes sense, that's why it hurt/I was reacting/fill in the blank".
And then we can decide what to do about it.
My IFS tend to be very discourse based, very much about people bringing all of their capacities and knowledge to the present tasks (and to choosing the tasks), though.
At times I will go "inside", but it is often about appreciating everything that is there.
I am not sure if this has much to do with "what is happening in IFS": for me, it is a way to interact with why we do what we do, and offer ourselves compassion, and seeing what happens from there.
There are other ways. This at times works. At times doesn't.
I find it easy to understand both sides of this disagreement. Theo's explanation of IFS on Twitter / X is beautiful and strongly differentiated from Scott's understanding of IFS. https://x.com/nowtheo/status/1793230046775177247
But (like the mind, I guess) IFS contains multitudes. Richard Schwartz believes parts are very literally true. I've found it much more useful to approach IFS as Theo describes it — using parts as a metaphor.
Questions for Scott and/or other IFS skeptics: Does the version of IFS as described by Theo seem intelligible / legible as a coherent idea? And if it seems coherent but not accessible, are you able to do Focusing? The Focusing process seems very simple, very non-woo, and a skill that's a necessary prerequisite for this flavor of IFS.
The inner imagery associated with IFS therapy sounds like what would happen if a person were deprived of all meaningful external motivation and goals. The brain is still active, so it tries to create scenarios to simulate having a purpose, but they are not constrained by reality due to no external input. Similar to the hallucination caused by sensory deprivation.
I often find myself daydreaming about building things for my family, and debating how to accomplish those things. When I snap out of it, I realize we don't need a hand built wood-fired hot tub, and I don't really have anything meaningful to do other than log back into Slack and answer a few more messages.
After all, not even the most ardent practitioner of IFS would advocate that we utilize this method for decisions with actual stakes. Does anyone think Putin should be trying to find his inner Sabby to see if tactical nukes are an appropriate option in Ukraine?
Did Einstein create (sorry, discover) entities inside of himself and bargain with them to develop general relativity? Apologies, I don't understand the connection to Einstein.
I'm fascinated by the range of theories about what the actual issue is we are trying to address and the number of models being offered up as a way of addressing it. I can't help but feel that it all seems to come down to the old adage "Know thyself." Clearly, we are all wrestling with what there is to know, how we should go about knowing it, and whether we really want to know.
My own feeling about it is, there is a clear duality in being a human being because of the abstract nature of our thinking and the absolutely physical reality of the body. What came to my mind is Dr. Doolittle's "the pushmi-pulu." There needs to be consonance between the two entities in order for any progress to be made.
I have a model that I have been thinking about since I signed up to this blog that is more of a computer-based metaphor.
We are born with nothing but machine code. At every stage, a new layer of emulation is coded over the machine code. It's not a rewrite, it's an emulation. By the time a person reaches 30 years or so (arbitrary) there are quite a few layers of emulation built upon each other. "Errors" or sub-optimal code can exist in every layer of emulation. In order to fix some bad code, it might be required to bore down a few levels of emulation and fix something closer to the original code before attempting to modify any layer above it. Sometimes this is not necessary; a more recent emulation can be patched up and achieve satisfactory results.
In order to make repairs on an emulation that is very close to the machine code one has to really understand the machine code; in this model, the machine code is the information the body provides and it doesn't speak English or any other spoken language; it's a different kind of language. It's machine code.
So IFS could be for some people a very good way of debugging code that is tricky to get at.
Meditation is also described both in very concrete material terms ("increase your concentration, like doing weight-lifting on your amygdala") and very woo woo terms ("direct your Qi, find higher planes").
Inner stuff is just weird like that. There's no *good* reason to restrict the discussion to the external, mutually observable, material world, so people can approach it from both materialistic and supernatural worldviews, and may not even realize they're coming from different worldviews at all.
I did (and doing with my therapist) a fair bit of IFS. I feel like it helped me resolve some issues during a session, but not sure if carried over to other times, even with a similar issue returning.
One thing to emphasize is that we don't just start a session with "so, let's talk to your Parts." We do it around a dilemma or something that bothers me or an emotionally loaded situation I can think up. Then it's much easier to see that a part of me wants to do X but another wants Y. We even use these terms colloquially. Then it's just about concentrating more on each of those parts, personify them (for me the imagery is a pretty artificial non-central part), what they need and want for me, and how I can put them at ease. Sometimes this is in the form of a conversation/debate. I do perform it with my eyes closed for concentration, but that's it. I had a good experience, and it's not mystical at all, and I'm not a mystical/spiritual person.
This is something I'm surprised anyone gives the time of day, given the whole repressed memories debacle of the 80s made it clear its very dangerous to treat the psyche as having repressed or latent qualities needing dredging up and dealing with.
like the process creates pseudomemories because you are purposefully in a vulnerable, suggestive setting being told by a perceived expert to do this. for this ifs, it wouldn't surprise me if trances and demons erupted out of it.
it also happened when i was younger and a charismatic christian; in the 90s there were ecstatic revivals like the toronto blessing, where a sign of the holy spirit's presence was uncontrollable laughter, and eventually making barking noises. or the base charismatic doctrine of "speaking in tongues," which is not divine translation as in acts, but speaking gibberish as an encoded prayer language that communicates to god when you don't know how.
trance like states might come naturally but i don't see any good at all. this is less the efficacy or reality of the thing but the dangerous power of expect and vulnerable patient.
How does the imaginary space of IFS compare to the process of writing fiction?
For instance, when you write a short story, can you "lightning-fast grab" ideas of what each character would say? Can you see elements of yourself in each character?
For instance, the Bay Area house party stories. They seem semi-autobiographical, so I don't know how much is borrowed from reality and how much is made up. But presumably, there's some exaggeration and artistic license in which you're inhabiting a personality and predicting what people would say. Could you do IFS where your family is the cast of a Bay Area house party(!)?
I've never done IFS but I've always felt very strongly like there are different parts of my mind. As far back as 14, I can remember referring to the parts of my head as Me, Myself, and I.
Me was energetic and hyperactive and excited about stuff and I want to use the word annoying but I think I just didn't know how to channel that while being likeable to others at that age.
Myself was mean and critical and told me I sucked and no one liked me, and against the rest of the members of my head.
I was the logical, rational decider who would observe the others in my head and talk to them and then make decisions about what I would do.
This has evolved over time and I don't use those names anymore but if I'm in the grocery store and see Peanut Butter M&Ms, I will still feel desire and then say out loud, "No, I'm not buying you candy".
Especially if I'm upset, I find I'll start using plural pronouns like We to talk about myself. Or if I'm experiencing an emotion that I don't endorse like social anxiety, I might say something like "he's just a little nervous. Give him some time and he'll be fine".
I'm surprised that when I talk about this other people don't relate. It feels like the normal state of things to me and I don't understand how others don't do it.
I think the idea that you have separate parts that want different things is actually quite mundane -- it's what's going on whenever you feel conflicted about something. My own internal explorations led me to what I later found out was IFS, although for me there wasn't any need to visualize my parts in any way. If I wanted to explore a part that was scared, I would just lean into the fear and see what came up -- intentionally allowing different emotions to be in the driver's seat. The most important element was a sense of genuine curiosity towards these parts/emotions -- this would allow them to speak without fear of being judged.
Incidentally, a while back the rationalists also developed a form of parts work called Internal Double Crux.
I read "No Bad Parts" by Richard Schwartz, the founder of IFS, and later also "You are the one you're looking for" in my attempt to become better at emotional intelligence, learning to know myself better, and becoming better at relationships. The books are well written and very convincing. The idea of the mind consisting of multiple sub-parts and a Self (I always imagined this to be the prefrontal cortex) make intuitive sense to me. Indeed one often wants multiple conflicting things, and I there is this presence that kind of knows best but that sadly isn't in control all to often.
However, my initial enthusiasm quickly faded after actually trying it. How does one identify a part? Visualize it? And then talk to it?!! I completely failed across the board. I contacted two IFS therapists and had 1 session, but in the end I found it way too expensive to actually go through with. One well sounding lesson was that I should be "in my body" more instead of in my head. But apart from feeling dread in my stomach, and tiredness in my skin, I had a hard time identifying feelings in my body.
I genuinely tried to ask my stomach dread what was going on, but no I got nothing. In the book they can all just have entire conversations with their parts.
Did anyone else here give it a go? What are your experiences?
Hey Herman, yeah I gave it a go and was like you when I began - really disconnected from my body and could only focus on the feeling of unease in my stomach (amongst others), similar to you. If you get nothing I'd probably say that's normal, I frequently experience that too. Not sure I have any suggestions except talk from my experience - the times I got somewhere I've observed I was generally in a relaxed state and felt open, curious and explorative all at the same time. Hope that gives some insight.
I've had a pretty good experience with IFS (I wrote about it too on my pub) but I did most of the discovery of my parts by myself. I found I discovered/got to know them mostly via the body then writing about them/mapping them out, not just closing my eyes and seeing who's there in my mind.
To be honest, I don't really get the trance like thing here. Like, you generally get into a meditative/relaxed state when you work with these parts, so that could just be considered "trance-like"? I guess I'm saying I don't understand why it's relevant or why it matters. It's kinda semantic/subjective too - anytime you're getting into slower brain waves (breathing, meditating, relaxing), I believe you're technically in a trance like state aka the state hypnotists work with aka your mind is just more suggestive.
You definitely wouldn't want to have a therapist making part suggestions that you don't feel/agree with and you didn't create here, though that depends on the strength and vulnerability of the client probably.
As for the demons thing, I'm sure people can experience those rogue-like parts, but calling them actual demons is just kinda weird IMO. I can see so many people getting lost in that. Some parts can be pretty combative and rogue-like (I've got one of those), and they can take a bit more time to form a relationship with (integrate). It seems pretty problematic that you'd even entertain the idea that one can have parts that don't originate from or belong to them. So imagine that were the case and then people go into parts work with that knowing, depending on their vulnerability/suggestibility, they might take that belief on and then have it become a reality, or worse yet therapists confirming demon parts are indeed real and the client is vulnerable/susceptible and accepts that belief without any critical thought.
I'm late to this but when working with an IFS therapist, I sometimes went into what could reasonably be described as a 'trance-like' state. It basically felt like I was just very deep inside myself, and the world was far away, and all my attention was taking up by my feelings and fleeting thoughts, and at the end it felt like it took a while to 'come back', something like waking up.
My therapist didn't do anything to induce this (that I'm aware of) beyond going through the standard IFS process as described in the manuals (of asking me to focus on parts, interact with them, etc) and I guess doing so in the sort of hypnotic, calm, slow, intensely-holding-space way of someone e.g. talking you through a guided meditation. Often this was more like Focusing and less verbal, I seldom got chatty parts with an obvious persona in this state.
(I often got those chatty parts when working on a shallower level, when I first started IFS. I now don't really get them. I feel generally mentally healthier than when I started with IFS so maybe they are integrated now).
Other times when I've been in a similar trance-like state:
-on magic mushrooms (I tend to go very 'inside myself' and feel lots of emotions)
-after a long cry
-after really 'transcendent' sex
-(mildly) after trying a tantric energy practice (I've not historically been a spiritual/mystical/woo-believing person)
From this I infer it's something to do with intense emotions.
There is something about 'hiding' too or shyness which I can't really explain.
Maybe slightly analogous: being really absorbed in a book/film?
I did some IFS which worked great, but I've always been on the prone-to-multiple-personality side of the spectrum so it was very natural for me to identify parts, and finding the Self mapped well to previous 'focus on the Spirit / the presence of God' Christian meditation.
None of it was conducted in a full trance, but a lot of it went on in my internal imaginary space which is probably difficult to access for people who don't customarily have one?
See, this is what confuses me! People saying "my internal imaginary space" with the same casualness they talk about "my bedroom".
Is this just the fact that if I tell you to visualize a tiger, you can visualize a tiger? Or is it some more complicated place where things happen independent of your "conscious will"?
I can visualise a tiger at will.
I feel like the people who say they can't visualise things might be a bit disappointed with the actual experience. I can look at the tiger, and it gets more detailed when I focus on a part of it, but I can't like... have sex with the tiger or anything.
Haha, that's the first action you though of? Freud would've loved to have a chat with you, I bet.
> but I can't like... have sex with the tiger or anything.
Wait, why not? Obviously you can imagine scenarios in your head, right?
Oh, incompetence! Never can my dreams engender the sexy beast sex I long for. The tiger indeed appears, but stuffed or flimsy, or with impure variations of shape, or of an implausible size, or all too fleeting, or with a touch of the dog or the bird.
As an aphantasiac, I spent most of my life so far (up until my early 20s) believing that people were speaking figuratively when they said to picture or visualize something. I didn't realize that some (most?) people can literally see something inside their mind.
I can't either (at least in my waking consciousness). Dreams are another story.
Yeah I know this is a thing. My comment was really like: a lot of ... aphantasiacs, if that's the right work - seem to think this is some kind of amazing ability they lack, whereas I find it fairly boring and non useful.
This is new to me, so I have to ask: does this mean you can’t even remember images? Can you not draw a tiger from memory?
I can't remember images, no. I remember the words my mind uses to describe things. I could probably draw a tiger from memory, but I don't know how detailed I could make it (even were I better at drawing than I am). So maybe that means that an image, or at least a symbolic representation, of a tiger is in there somewhere? I certainly recognize people without needing to translate them into words. But I can't, at will, pull up images of them
Interesting. Perhaps if you practiced drawing stuff from memory, you could develop your visualization. But surely you’ve tried that. I can’t imagine what it’s like ;) - sorry, that’s probably a stale joke by now.
How realistic is the imagery? Do you need to close your eyes to imagine it? Or can you imagine the tiger while looking at something else?
What about your dreams? Are they hyperrealistic — i.e. you see a lot of details?
I can't visualize things at all well (at least with my waking consciousness). But I'm not a bad draftsperson. I could probably sketch a moderately realistic tiger from memory. So the image is in my brain somewhere — but I can't access it unless I put down on paper. But my dreams are all hyperrealistic for me. In fact, I've dreamt of tigers and they're quite realistic in my dreams. I've never been able to figure out why my dreaming consciousness is so vivid, but my waking imagination is so blank.
Reasonably realistic, but a bit patchy and kind of static where I'm not focusing directly. Don't need to close my eyes, in fact I'd say that closing my eyes makes it slightly harder.
I do dream, but I (personally) think that dreams are not at all interesting so I never bother evaluating them.
Tiger Tiger, burning bright, in the forest of the night
What mortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?
I think everything that goes on in our minds takes place in an internal imaginary space. The proposition that anything objectively true happens there is the confusing proposition to me.
Yes. Basically, working in that space. If you had a part, I would say, "does any visual representation come to mind that connect to this part?"
More complicated, but it's all me. It's like 'visualise a tiger' but the tiger is situated in a place?
By default mine is just a totally dark space but I can give it a backdrop if I concentrate (similar mechanism to memory recall but it doesn't have to be exactly somewhere I've been, it's just easier to start with memory to have enough detail).
Sometimes I just do conversation without bothering with the physical layout, which is more like being on the phone to the other aspect of me? When I'm paying attention to verbal thoughts I normally internally hear them.
But IFS sometimes worked better when I actually placed the parts in the internal space like we were having some kind of meeting - it's still me arranging it, but it let them act more fluidly.
I also use this for eg designing backstory and personality for larp characters, imagining story scenes, practicing conversations with my model of other people, etc etc
>By default mine is just a totally dark space but I can give it a backdrop if I concentrate (similar mechanism to memory recall but it doesn't have to be exactly somewhere I've been, it's just easier to start with memory to have enough detail).
This is also my experience. The way I'd interpret "my internal imaginary space" is that unless I'm specifically imagining the tiger in the room with me, it's in some vague "off-camera" location that by default has a dark or undefined backdrop but could have some other context if I focus on imagining that as well. This "location" feels the same as when I'm calling up detailed visual memories, and it's easier to visualize details in either recollections or imaginings if I close my eyes so I'm not distracted by real visual input.
The visual impression of the "off camera" location is either superimposed on my regular visual field almost like if I were looking into a slide viewer with my non-dominant eye, or less commonly it's in the upper or side fringes of my visual field.
Mine doesn't overlay my visual field - I can have a pacing tiger in my off camera space while looking at things, to the usual limits of split concentration (although it is easier to do complicated scenes with closed eyes). I can also very faintly overlay the tiger in the real world but it's very faint. If the space is anywhere it's literally inside my head, behind my eyes.
This all sounds exactly like my internal imaginary space.
There seem to be huge differences in natural ability but also training effects (insight meditation, visualization meditations). Friends had fully decked out internal rooms they liked to hang out in and inspect without any training. Other ones could just silence their thoughts, fill out their whole field with a color or orgasm without touching themselves.
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Before meditation/insight, I had difficulty feeling like I could visualize anything. Even close to cessation my mind is usually still talking a bit (Vipassana cycling not concentration jhanic Arc). However, getting towards 4th path and doing light Kassina meditation seemed to have helped a lot. Both with my mind quieting a bit when I want and in general, visualization and letting my mind give me answers like the IFS parts.
I think the insight side of this helped with just letting things be. Realizing that I am not any of the thoughts or process/all of them. Experience already is the answer calculated by relevance realization/predictive processing. The thoughts which say they are looking for the answer are status reports of what's going on, but it's not "me" doing anything.
It's similar to realizing that I can't solve a tricky math problem. I can learn about the structure of the objects I am working on, try to apply specific techniques but at some point (actually at all points) my brain will do calculations which I don't have conscious access to. I can fill the time where my brain is working on the problem with a lot of chatter or not. Asking for constant updates on how the calculation is doing or not.
A different framework would be shifting attention and keeping it on things my subconscious throws up which meditation can help with since it's to a good part about training attention.
Using the framework Kax_sotala used on reddit: Noticing very quick thoughts or rejections becomes easier when you are trying to count the frames of your reality and trying to notice intentions before your actions (https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1cx3mp6/book_review_the_others_within_us/l55gie7/). You can then try to keep your attention on that "submind/process/whatever". I am sometimes missing bigger constructed things focusing on the fast parts.
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I will start IFS next week and see what happens. Before meditation my thought process would have just been questioning everything that came up until it would have maybe gone towards incompleteness/the strange loopy nature of anything I was doing. If I was seeing beauty it would question what beauty is. If I was visualizing a beach for 0.1s it would question whether it was really a beach, taking everything apart.
Now, when I had a moment where I was mad after talking to my parents for no good reason, I came home and lay down to investigate it. My mind started mentioning school and how I hated them for sending me there. This was a mix of thoughts coming up and "me" making guesses but realizing that me making a guess is also an answer the algorithm of my mind provides. Reality is already the answer. Then, I actually started to visualize some Doom like scenes of my tearing out brains and interpreted it as the part that was very, very angry and hurt and then came another part which I interpreted as the manager, which was managing things by putting emotions to the side and being a bit of a psychopath taking care of things. And then there was the self part which told the hurt part that it and the psychopath would protect the hurt part and telling the psychopath part that I would trust it to take care of things if it was necessary but that right now it wasn't as necessary. All of this was somewhere in between the total trance and no meta-thoughts vs only meta-thoughts and questioning.
Maybe, it's also that insight let's me escape some trapped priors where before it would have been mostly the psychopath talking or something else.
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Light Kassina meditation seems to help with visualization though this seems to also depend on my stage in the cycle of insight. I should investigate this.
In some ways the trick with visualization is similar. You can't visualize things. Your mind can. It's doing it right now. Though there are very interesting questions here about eyes closed, eyes open, actual "internal space" vs e.g. using the signals from your eyes when they are closed. There are different types of light Kassina meditation. One where you go: Give me an image of the candle flame and wait. The other more Ingram style where you start off with the afterimage of something. I am doing the second and am still unsure whether the second ever shifts to the first. The second one seems to be interpolating things in a "space of experience" the brain isn't used to which leads to cool results. Looking long enough at the dark and you brain might see something there especially if you shift your attention to anything interesting that appears for a part of a second. Similar to psychedelics in the result in some ways but doing it with your own power. Is this space the same as "internal images?"
One interesting thing that happens (I think mostly in A&P territory) is that I might close my eyes and then after a few seconds I am looking at discord on my phone or seeing my friends talk and then I open my eye and realize that it wasn't real. I don't think this happened before I started meditating, but I am not sure. Total meditation time less than
1k hours over 1.5 years but I already had Streamentry.
--- Random aside:
Maybe, I had BPD which seems to super push people towards enlightenment. If someone tells me they got streamentry without practice my first question would be whether they have BPD and ADHD/Autism. Marsha Linnehan the inventor of DBT had BPD and became a Zen master but had A&P/maybe streamentry beforehand. Her autobiography is very touching.
I know 3 other friends who have ADHD/Autism and diagnosed BPD and streamentry without or with little practice. This seems absurd. However, I also know a lot of autistic and BPD people so there might be a strong sampling bias here. I know one other person who got Streamentry without practice. She is somewhat autistic (idk if diagnosed) and I don't know whether she has BPD but she might.
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I am no expert but I would highly discourage people from trying to do magic/believing in demons, especially with psychedelics unless/until they really know what they are doing. Get a teacher and some friends who will tell you that you are going insane.
Just curious, what definition of 4th path are you using, and what permanent changes do you believe you've undergone?
The MCTB definition (https://www.mctb.org/mctb2/table-of-contents/part-v-awakening/37-models-of-the-stages-of-awakening/a-revised-four-path-model/)
> 1) the total and final elimination of any sense that there is anything called “attention” or “awareness” that is different from, separate from, or unrelated to bare phenomena;
2) the perfect direct comprehension of all sensations in the entire field where and as they are by themselves, as perception and the sensations are the same thing, so the parity between perception and reality is perfectly one to one at all times, meaning that the question of parity is actually completely eliminated perceptually, as there are just sensations;
3) the total naturalness of the field, such that everything is obviously happening completely on its own in a perfectly causal way;
4) the total integration of all sense doors into one unified and all-pervading “sense door” as mentioned in the Time and Space models section (meaning that all sensations appear to be just qualities of this perfectly integrated, boundaryless, fluxing, created-on-the-fly volume), which also specifically means that all thoughts are perceived naturally as part of this same integrated, fluxing volume;
5) the direct and immediate perception that time and space are created out of sensations that arise and vanish now, such that the sense of time and space as existing real entities is entirely seen through;
6) all sensate phenomena without exception self-liberate automatically, meaning that the experience of such questions as, “Is this field awake?” yields a wonderfully direct and satisfying experience of centerlessness and directness of the whole interdependent moment of that same question;
7) any sense of a this-and-that is fundamentally completely uprooted at the perceptual level (not that ordinary discrimination doesn’t function as before), and that this holds up over the long-haul, meaning off-retreat and for years in the face of the strongest vicissitudes of life, across insight cycles, across jhanas and other shifts, and is the only and default perceptual mode at all times when there are any sensations of any kind occurring.
I am not sure I am 100% there yet I will be able to tell more in a year ^^.
To describe it differently it felt like 1st path gave me the solution to the problem of the purpose of life/all of these other stupid problems. The solution is emptiness/incompleteness. Understanding that on some experiential level resolved my depression, made me pretty contend and shifted me in the direction of no-self. After that I could always remind myself that everything was always fine no matter what happened. However, I wasn't necessarily experiencing it in every moment which didn't really change until 4th path territory.
3rd path was about actually being in this present moment for the first time/understanding what luminosity/non-duality actually mean. From there it was already pretty obvious what getting to 4th path would mean on a conceptual level though not experientially.
Then there were some shifts towards more emptiness, less body schema construction, less "this and that" until I had the first moment where it felt like I had gotten 4th path but then fell out of it again and that has been happening for a while. The first time I was super nervous about losing it again and not getting it backed now I am very chill about it which helps because the trying to get/have something seems to be the actual problem.
What I would add to the longer definition is that it's incredibly relaxing not to have to do anything because everything is happening on it's own even the movement of attention.
When I choose to imagine a tiger, I don’t exactly choose what that tiger looks like, nor what form it takes. For me, when I choose to imagine a tiger, initially, a tiger’s face forms against a black, almost non-existent background; other people, on the other hand, might imagine the profile of a tiger’s body in a rich, natural environment (and I imagine there is a lot more sensorial variation than that). I can always choose to modify the tiger in my mind in part or whole, but every choice to imagine or re-imagine the tiger isn’t really so much a choice to imagine something as it is a choice to begin a mental process that results in an emergent imaginary outcome … That’s the way it is for me, at least. Do other people feel like the imagined experiences their mind produces are much more autonomously and deliberatively created than that?
I generally find that when I imagine a tiger I first get a kind of tiger signifier - if I insist on more detail, to me it's the body rather than the head that comes most naturally, faces are difficult! - and if I examine it in more detail it generates more detail, much like the process of remembering a dream.
I can be fussy about the exact details but the more I focus on one detail the fuzzier the rest of it gets, much like focusing on something in your actual visual field, but somewhat more so (I don't have very good imaginary peripheral vision).
> generally find that when I imagine a tiger I first get a kind of tiger signifier
Not surprising; good luck getting anything else but a signifier in your imagination, no matter how detailed.
When I was a child, I had a persistent problem where I could visualize lots of things (in my "internal imaginary space, perhaps), which was nice for reading books or just when I was bored on car trips, but whenever I spent too much time visualizing a sufficiently detailed scene, earthquakes would start happening in it to tear it apart.
(Well, what I thought were earthquakes at the time. As I understand, most earthquakes don't actually involve chasms opening in the ground everywhere, but that's what kept happening in my visualizations.)
>As I understand, most earthquakes don't actually involve chasms opening in the ground everywhere
Now I'm imagining a parent seeing their kid imagining things, deciding "all right that's enough of that", and reaching inside the kid's imagination to rip the setting in half.
My imaginary space is similar to how others described it: black background, full body tiger, if I choose to I can focus on its part like fluffy striped fur over its shoulder sockets. Rarely, things go uncontrollably wrong with my imagination space. Some parts of the tiger (paws, ears) begin to oscillate in size and weight. Strangely, teeth sometimes increase in weight so much that the head involuntarily drops. And then I sympathetically feel the weight in my own teeth. Sometimes the tiger would turn into a caricature or a stuffed toy, like someone else mentioned; and then I have to shape it back into its normal shape.
I can imagine an avatar of myself cuddling the tiger. Or the tiger can be an avatar of myself, and I sense the kinetics of its movements. But it is always an avatar, never actually me. Even when I'm seeing things from its POV, it's because the camera is placed in its eyes for the purpose of the scene. *Me* is the room, whatever contains this scene, plus whatever goes on outside. The entirety of *me* is too big to be inside the imagination scape.
This imagination scape can be filled with anything else, too. Rehearsal of an email reply imagined on a disemcomputered screen. Voice-only conversation. Full-color full-senses memory. A path through space I'm about to take, sans clutter like buildings alongside the road or other cars. I can project this space onto the world at whatever scale. Pocket tiger. Mountain-sized tiger. Visual "flashback" overlaid over terrain. But filling this space with... a snake named Sabby? that is supposed to be discovered, not invented? that has agency independent of mine? I'd have to make a lot of deliberate choices and then pretend them away. (Pretending away a choice isn't too weird in imagination scape. I can pretend like I'm not controlling the tiger, and see what tiger thing it does, and it attacks my avatar, and I can pretend it's taking all I've got to fight it off. But there's still a level of understanding where I know that I'm actually controlling the tiger, and choose my avatar's competence in fending off the tiger.) So I can summon Sabby, but what would I get out of this role play that I hadn't already scripted or that doesn't involve Sabby's fangs getting big and heavy and dropping to Photoshop-checkered ground?
When I do IFS, it's more complicated than me visualizing a tiger. For me, it's the same place where I practice or experience prayer; it's in my "inner sanctum". When I encounter God, or a part, in my "inner sanctum" it feels like inviting them in to my private space, and interacting with a agent over whom I do not have full conscious control. I could choose to evict God from my inner sanctum; I could choose to pull out different aspects of myself into distinct entities for me to interact with. God feels external to me, and vast, and more outside of my control; God often doesn't answer my questions, for example, where my parts always do. But even for my parts, I don't control what they bring to the table. (This feels akin to the fact that I can't stop being sad by wishing; I can't stop being hungry by deciding.) I have a sensation that I could *force* my parts to say certain things, but I would just be lying to myself. I could also take a part of me and put it in a God-costume and make it say things; but I don't have control over what the actual God-entity says.
I have also had a couple of lucid dreams; and that was a very different experience from going into my "inner sanctum". My inner sanctum is much more mundane than a lucid dream. I remain my presence in the real world; in that sense, it *is* like imagining a tiger. But it's also deeper/richer than just imagination (though imagination can often bring me there). If I really had to say what my inner sanctum is, I would say is my spiritual awareness. It's where the image of God (the non-material spirit that is in me, my "core self", my "soul") can interact with spiritual (non-material) reality. My inner sanctum is thus the place in myself where I interface with the spiritual reality. (Scott, my less-flattering hypothesis of your experience with IFS is that you haven't developed a spiritual awareness.)
Note: I don't think that I am anywhere near the multiple personality side of the spectrum; and yet this is easy for me. I think my practice as a Christian softened me to be open to interacting with my parts / opened me up to a spiritual reality beyond the material.
What's confusing you exactly? It sound a bit like afantasia. I read about people realizing they have it way later in their lives. It's associated with autism/BAP and face blindness as well, if having a hard time remembering faces is your thing as well. But maybe I'm just reading it wrong.
I'm not sure how others would answer, but as a writer I'd say it comes half from the same place as where my fictional characters and their personality and dialogue comes from, just with something like introspection and Focusing-like "felt senses" filling in for the substantial half.
Right on. Creating characters for novels or plays is precisely IFS
I think this is the confusion right here. It's like the discourse over whether one has an "internal dialogue," with some people on one side being incredulous that others are different.
Simple fact: some people have fairly rich, easily accessed imaginal spaces, complete with visuals and narrative. If you've ever seen a small child playing with toys and talking to itself, that's what you're witnesses.
If you don't experience this yourself, that's OK: you're like one of the people without internal dialogues. But you should ~not~ be incredulous that others have this.
I’ve always been able to imagine stories in pretty vivid detail that surprised me on occasion.
I’ve only ever had one “psychedelic” experience but it was totally different. I also had it without ever having taken a psychedelic. Felt like I was experiencing direct reality. I don’t know how else to explain it, but it was a lot different than what’s described here. This sounds like people vividly imagining things.
I'm the child of a diagnosed (and briefly institutionalized) manic depressive with significant auditory and visual religious hallucinations. She wrote a thousand page religious text of visions, and I don't believe in it, but it's totally coherent with respect to her religion.
I clearly inherited some of her mental predispositions, but a high functioning version, and my daughter seems the same. Also I have some synaesthesia.
Every time you do one of these posts about inner mental life, meditation, self induced euphoria, IFS, whatever... my experience is "oh, that sounds familiar. these people took something I do, or used to do, and did a good job of exploring it".
I perceive (and I think maybe other people would also perceive) a spectrum running from "visualize a tiger", to "pretend there's a tiger", to "let go of your inhibitions and just fully commit to pretending there's a tiger", to "i am having a delusion about a tiger", to "this tiger is real and nobody can convince me otherwise". You could plot this spectrum purely in terms of how little of your attention is on your sensorium. Full delusion is just like trapped priors.
I used to experience a sense of vastness at night sometimes while trying to fall asleep. Sometimes I would lean in to this feeling and "experience" traveling the cosmos at an impossible scale. Sometimes I would also lay awake at night staring at the LED numbers on my alarm clock and "flex" them to be larger or smaller or slightly different colors. I would say this was putting a very gentle toe into "i am having a delusion about a tiger" territory. Or maybe I can astral project! Who knows, ha ha.
The scariest parenting day of my life was when my three year old screamed "I can't see! I can't see! I'm blind! I can't see!" from the back of our car on a long drive for like fifteen minutes during a tantrum.
I don't want to go to the "demons are in the room right now" place where my mom went. It happened for a lot of reasons, including chemical, but also including the way her religion encouraged her to have daily contact with that part of her mind. So I work to control that aspect of myself, to have measured and mediated contact with that part of *my* mind.
So I guess what I'm saying is, people vary in how much they can replace external stimulus with internal imagination, and for a lot of people it's a choice to keep or lose contact with sensory reality, and *hic sunt dracones^h^h^h daemones* on the far side. It's no surprise to me that IFS is beneficial for people and also leads therapists and patients alike to believe in demons.
Thank you for your comment, that was very thoughtful and helpful. Have you ever read the book, "When God Talks Back" by T. M. Luhrmann? It's about the history of American Evangelical Christianity and the way it relates to emotional imagination. The author also discusses, and even tries out, other spiritual paths with similar characteristics. I would actually describe it as Spiritual gonzo journalism and it's an excellent read.
What is confusing about an internal imaginary space ( quotes omitted)? Everything that goes on in our minds occurs in that space. The idea that anything objectively true goes on in our mind is the confusing proposition to me.
Tiger Tiger burning bright.
In the forest of the night.
What mortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry
"prone-to-multiple-personality side of the spectrum"
Could you, uh, say more about this? Do you have giant gaps in your memory where people report you acting differently and using a different name? What's the underlying spectrum? Extreme moodiness? Do you dissociate or something?
I'm really interested in the concept of multiple personalities and would love to hear more.
No, those are all more full on DID/multiple type things - I've never lost time or externally gone by another name or even really explicitly had independent parts switch front. (I have had a friend with classic DID with an entirely separate person that showed up for a bit after a traumatic event, and several with multiplicity of the multiple names and swapping out who is driving varieties.)
I am more just prone to identifying the different modes I operate in (like, the Efficiency Beast that gets stuff done but is quite callous and socially impatient, the Chameleon that does social situations, etc). Some of these sometimes act without bothering to consult my conscious processing, but no more than eg a person in flow state does.
From observation it seems people are on a spectrum of this from experiencing themselves as a very singular entity, through recognising conflicting motivations within themselves, naming and personifying those motivations to an increasing extent, being able to 'wake up' characters and models of other people enough to converse and interact internally, to having alters that are multiple full fledged people sharing one body, to having the awkward effects of losing time / uncontrolled switching personality.
I can easily name parts and with some effort wake up characters, but I still have a central self.
"the Efficiency Beast that gets stuff done but is quite callous and socially impatient, the Chameleon that does social situations, etc"
How is that not just contextually-appropriate personality modulation? I get more focused when I have stuff to do too, and I generally act more polite and extroverted at parties. On some level that's just basic adulting. What makes you think that your behavior lies on some spectrum of pathology?
That's why I call it a spectrum - there's a gradual shading between 'I just modulate my personality for the context' through 'I have a set of competing forces within my mind that manifest in certain ways and compete with each other but they're all fundamentally aspects of me, or deliberate creations' to 'I am made up of multiple distinct people none of which is centrally more me than the others'.
To some extent it's just a way of relating to the competing motivations that most people have, but at each end it gets fairly clearly distinct (and sometimes hard to understand the other end).
Sure. I'm interested in the specific thing that makes you view it as pathological as opposed to normal variation. Do you act contextually inappropriate? Do you dissociate under stress? Do people complain that you act crazy?
I didn't actually say it was pathological?
I view multiple personalities as a kind of normal variation, it only becomes pathological when eg losing time and uncontrollably switching at a level that has a negative impact on everyday living.
Obviously you're possessed by a tiger-demon.
I think my brain is implementing the https://xkcd.com/221/ algorithm.
Given how often I would expect people to pick 17, 42, or 47 as a "random" number, I think you're right. (Though now that I look it up, it looks like I guessed the wrong numbers: https://telescoper.blog/2018/04/11/what-happens-if-you-ask-people-to-pick-a-number-at-random-between-1-and-100/. See also https://sites.socsci.uci.edu/~kjameson/ECST/Saito_ComparativeCrossCulturalColorPreferenceAndItsStructure.pdf saying that blue is the most commonly picked color and seven is the most commonly picked 1-10 integer.) I suspect many people would, if told to think of a random thing, think of a pink elephant.
Actually 37. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6iQrh2TK98
Learn something new every day.
Uhuh, we'd better be prepared for Scott to run amok...
Once you've run one mok, you've run them all
Psychology... a cult for the middle classes
Fewer comments like this, please (medium warning - 50% of a ban). Not even against this opinion, but you can't drive-by with inflammatory comments and not support them.
Fair enough. I take your point. I feel that psychology is essentially a group behaviour that cements tribal inclusion without in any way addressing the underlying existential issues that beset the anthropomorphically forged human ego. So, to me, it's more of a cult than anything else.
Uh, and is there anybody who does in fact legitimately "address the underlying existential issues that beset the anthropomorphically forged human ego"? How can we tell?
I feel like just talking about it is a start. We're running a program in our frontal lobes, which creates a specific sense of personal selfhood. And it's not fixed, it's expanding into ever more abstracted ideational layers. There are problems with doing this and psychology is neither recognising nor addressing this.
Psychology is rapidly becoming a colossal fail.
Admittedly I'm not up to date on the exact state of mainstream in psychology/psychiatry, but stuff like https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/x4n4jcoDP7xh5LWLq/book-summary-consciousness-and-the-brain makes me think that at least some people there are aware of neuroscience and try to incorporate its insights.
Yes, that is true. The strength of the nervous system and the weakness of the personal self is I think increasingly recognised.
But I still suspect that were psychology to collapse and something else start to take its place, people would do better. A lot of psych is really just middle class people endlessly navel gazing.
The main takeaway I have from psychology is it is one of those uncommon professions where the more you hear about it the less respect you have for it. Like I find IFS as described here legit embarrassing.
The thing with psychology is that it looks like it really should work on paper but, historically, studies tend to find it ineffective. Working as a therapist, I'm not totally against things like IFS. They have a place. But each new therapy rapidly descends into a cult, as happened with Hellinger's work a generation ago. You just get a mass of people, all preaching IFS to each other, like it's gonna take all their issues away.
They have big ears.
Aren't a lot of therapists doing exactly that when they take elements from Buddhism?
Therapists are a bit looser than psychologists. For a psychologist to try to integrate Buddhism sounds like giving up to me!
I guess I should report negative results too: I don't have much experience with IFS but after reading your review I tried to look for my internal parts (I closed my eyes and thought "is anyone here?" and waited a bit for something to come to my mind spontaneously), but it was just quiet. When I explicitly tried to generate random stuff I got random funny sounding words like moist, numbers (usually primes), Shu'Azub the Hoarder of Souls, and random colors. Fwiw I don't think I'm very good at introspecting into my thought processes or communication in general, so, for me at least, the problem lies elsewhere.
A frame that is more of the work of Reggie Ray's somatic descent is to put your attention in the body, give it time to settle there and get comfortable, and then generate a greeting towards yourself, your sensations or your experience. Something like "hello there" or "greetings" and see if you get something interesting happening.
See this link for the full practice https://s3.amazonaws.com/morla/documents/Somatic+Descent+Jan_2015.pdf
All this talk about fully formed "parts" leaves me pretty baffled as well, and yet something in the vicinity of this seems obviously true at the same time. Here's a quote from a Kaj Sotala's reddit comment: "Have you ever thought about doing something and then felt a slight unease about it and then quickly started thinking about something else? If you have, then you're already most of the way there. You just need to pay a bit more attention to that sense of unease that's already in your (normal waking) consciousness, and see if you'd get a feeling of what exactly about it is that's making you uncomfortable. (And an IFS therapist would phrase this as "ask the unease what it's worried about".)"
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1cx3mp6/book_review_the_others_within_us/l55gie7/
Isn't that just simply confronting your problems instead of running away from them? I think I'd rather have the exorcism stuff tbh.
I don't see much to extract from the fact that sometimes people can think of solutions to problems that conflict with their own morals. This is basically just the observation that sometimes a moral code hurts you.
But here's a quote from Taran Wanderer:
> Was there the slimmest hope of saving the stricken herdsman? If not, even Prince Gwydion would not reproach Taran's decision. Nor would any man. Instead, they would grieve with him at his loss. Free of his burden, free of the valley, the door of his cage opened wide, and all his life awaited him; Eilonwy, Caer Dallben. He seemed to hear his own voice speak these words, and he listened with shame and horror.
No that is silly talk. What a weird stretch.
If "parts" are actually behavioural suites that arise in response to situations, you wouldn't see them when you are doing nothing -- you need to observe yourself in action.
>When I explicitly tried to generate random stuff I got random funny sounding words like moist, numbers (usually primes), Shu'Azub the Hoarder of Souls, and random colors
There's a writing exercise that starts that way, writing random gibberish that's supposed to lead into more concrete ideas. https://thewritepractice.com/writing-exercise-unstuck/
So, how long did you stay in random mode?
If you were to build a shrine to Shu'Azub, what structural and aesthetic details would it need in order to be serviceable? What are the proper rites and offerings for such a place, and what boons or curses might result from performing them with excellence, or failing to do so? https://egypt.urnash.com/stella/
Hi Scott-appreciate the intellectual curiosity about this. I've found it a pretty useful modality. Not into therapy in general, but this specifically has helped me figure out a few things in my life. No trances involved.
The way I did it was: look at a situation when I felt wounded or hurt. In this case it was a sense of rejection. Investigate, "if I was going to personify that sense of self I was holding on to in that situation-what they looked like, acted like, when they were formed, what would they look like?"
Then ask, "what are they trying to defend? Where was this identity or sense of self (aka part) formed? Was it crafted at some point due to an inability to cope, or was it crafted as some sort of defense mechanism, etc?" You can then "ask it" directly, which doesnt feel much like a trance and feels more like an actor probing a part. "Okay I am given the part of Hamlet--Okay how do I feel, how do I look at the world? etc".
I wonder in your own writing of Unsong if you did some of this. What does this character feel or what would they say? Same mechanism. And you may find that those same characters are bits of your own parts :)
Very similar to my experience
It really is Satan corrupting our minds to take us over.
No, it's not. But I feel that there are a lot of therapists out there, all being trained in subtly different ways in the [insert shiny new technique] depending on who their mentor/guru/wise old owl original teacher of the technique was, and how close that person is to the Originator Of All the technique.
So some people will be more hard-nosed, and then some people will be more hippy-dippy. And since there is no One True Way of doing the therapy, the ones who go full tilt for the Jungian shadow archetypes will go all the way there (and I like Jung's ideas, don't get me wrong, but it's as much philosophy or artistic creativity as about what is going on inside our heads).
And schools of everything - art, therapy, you name it - expand and diffuse and get weird accretions as time goes on and the idea spreads out geographically. So this is the sort of thing I'd expect, to be honest. It's *why* early Christianity was so hung up about definitions and what was or was not in the canon, all the later chin-stroking by liberal thinkers about "why did they burn each other at the stake over the position of an iota?" be damned.
Falconer is not the originator of IFS, but he studied at the feet of the guru and has been doing this for decades by now. He's clearly, by his website, moved on to "spiritual guidance" rather than just plain psychotherapy, and is now himself in guru/head lama/spiritual director mode.
So, yeah: we're not in talk therapy territory any more, this is climbing up Maslow's pyramid to the summit of self-actualisation.
>liberal thinkers about "why did they burn each other at the stake over the position of an iota?" be damned.
Is the intended conclusion from this line of thinking that they didn't have enough stake-burnings to avoid issues like "filioque", "sola scriptura", and certain royal divorces?
No, it's that "but it's just a teeny-tiny difference, can it really be that big a deal?" about "isn't it okay if some people find this sort of symbolic language useful for the technique?" then turns into "crikey, some of the people doing this believe their clients are actually possessed by actual demons and they need to actually exorcise them".
You got something there. I remember this from the physiotherapy culture. Smart enterpising people find out stuff that works, found a school, there's some hype about it, people learn the method, quite some of them are neither smart enough to do it right nor to see it's limits, it all mellows out.
I work with people using ifs. I'd strongly recommend Jay Earley's work for Rationalists as a systematic approach that is clear and has limited ideological bias.
Even among ifs practitioners there's different opinions on what's going on. I think fundamentally *it doesn't matter* other than it seems to work to help people.
Having said that here's a few ideas of what's going on.
In general we reify parts. One opinion is that we cut the psyche into a piece to work on it. A sentence like, "show me the part of myself that has confidence" has the agency in the cutting capacity.
Another option is that we *discover* parts. We go wandering around the landscape of our psyche and we find we have already split into parts. We then have some friendly reasoning conversations including compassion and understanding and parts relax their stubborn grip on their behaviour.
Another option is that we created the parts when traumatic things happened. In the therapy we go find the part that exists and then work with it.
For most people I've talked to, parts seem to go away after the session. A rare few people seem to be able to keep a part around, even on the time scale of years. I don't know why, usually these things want to relax and unify with the rest of the psyche.
In rare instances we seem to be able to inherit parts from our caregivers or environment. I've even encountered a "ghost" like part than went away after a conversation and some resolution of the ghosts issues. (no ideological promises here either)
Generally trying to form rules about the world from strange therapy moments is not good epistemics.
In narrative therapy or big mind, we can even create a part by name (for example they use "the controller" to set up some safety contexts for the person's psyche.)
Theres isn't one model of how to do ifs or one clear explanation of how it works. But I want to emphasise that it doesn't matter as long as it's helping people and not harming them.
Jay Earley's work invites the client to see ifs as operating down 4 channels. The visual, the auditory, the emotional and the physical somatic. Parts are accessed by these 4 channels. "what does the part look like?" "what is it saying?" etc.
We are using the internal visual canvas to connect to the part and work with it. Some people have more access to these channels and some parts just don't have information in all channels.
One fundamental thing about ifs is that the client accesses and manages the relationships with their own parts. The therapist acts as a guide for the client, rarely trying to contact the parts directly.
"can you ask the part, what is its job?" is a standard Jay Earley question.
It's not the therapist working with the part, it's the client. I think this frame helps a lot of things.
Richard Schwartz ifs works differently, it invites the client to put the part in a Room and observe from outside. If the client feels they are back in the room, they are instructed to leave the room again, sometimes separating out another part as they go. This also maintains a stable platform (of "self") for the therapeutic work. Again, it's different to Jay Earley work but they both "work" for different people.
I think there's ideological problems where people accidentally bring judgements in but having different frames will make it easier to find one where those judgements (or more specifically conflicting parts) cause less disruption to the work.
Seems to me that IFS is going through adaptive radiation, and your review caught it between the "therapist finds a neat approach that works well on some patients, tells therapist friends about it" and "the approach is optimized and everyone uses the same common guidelines to do IFS" stages. So maybe there are lots of small, related schools that all call themselves IFS and use Parts, but aren't exactly the same thing?
Imagine if we didn't have different names for individual butterfly clades. Entomologist Scott Alexander reads a book on nymphalids and says "hey, butterflies have four wings, they go through a caterpillar stage, they have a mating ritual where the male presses the female's antennae between his wings". Another entomologist who works on swallowtails comes along and says "huh, that's not exactly right, the wings and caterpillar thing is true but males engage in aerial mock combat instead". Then a third, who works on bagworms, is like "what are you talking about, butterflies don't have wings".
So some psychiatrists really go with the "okay, so the part of you who wants to sit around in darkness all day is shaped like a tunicate, because that's the first thing that came to your mind" approach, others really work with subconscious "modules" that you have to negotiate with (which sometimes call themselves demons), and still others really preface their sessions with "What I'm about to do has not been approved by the Vatican". Eventually some "best" method that fits most people will emerge, and everyone will go with that, but until then each therapist does whatever works with their patients?
"Tigers surprisingly often!" - don't we all remember those pics where young Scott was petting tigers (Asia-trip, somehow Buddhist tigers). Scroll down for Tigers: https://web.archive.org/web/20131230114302/http://squid314.livejournal.com/?skip=10&tag=images
So that's what Scott looked like when he was younger. Who's the kid with him though?
I'd imagine anyone with a strong DMN would have a difficult time doing IFS. Or someone who's neurons are rigid vs. entropic.
But yeah, you're definitely posessed by a tiger demon. I'd find a priest.
DMN?
Perhaps it stands for demon?
Default mode network? Not that I remember what that means, exactly.
I’ve never done IFS, but over the last few years, I have been influenced by the elephant-and-the-rider metaphor (that I learned from Jonathan Haidt’s writing, if I remember correctly, though I don’t know if it originated with him) for thinking about System 1 and System 2 processing. I think of my “elephant” as all of my automatic, spontaneously formed internal signals and reactions (System 1) and my “rider” as all of my deliberative, metacognitive internal signals and reactions (System 2).
I identify with both the rider and the elephant equally, and I even, sometimes (when I’m struggling to identify or resolve some difficult, usually affective state of affairs), do something I call “emotions writing,” in which elephant-Connor and rider-Connor talk, usually with the goal of non-judgementally investigating, sympathizing with, learning from, and (if needed) gently adjusting what elephant-Connor is going through.
I view this all as just a neat metaphor and a useful strategy, and, in fact, I see it all as based on a somewhat wrong model of the mind (in the sense that “all models are wrong, but some are useful,” at the very least). In any case, I find this metaphor and strategy to be profoundly useful! It helps me to regulate, adjust, and resolve my feelings, while also helping me to learn from them about those people, places, things, and cognitive patterns that are “right” for me (in the sense that they increase elephant- and rider-Connor’s sense of subjective wellbeing and make them more resilient to life’s inevitable setbacks and pitfalls).
It’s not quite IFS, but I see it all as IFS-adjacent … even though my BS-alarms are usually ringing around most of the IFS stuff I have read about … and now about the demons. I think that the devil (or the demon) can be in the details when it comes to this stuff: I implicitly conceptualize my elephant and rider in certain ways that affect how those conversations between them go, I have a very existentially nihilistic worldview that makes my rider particularly non-judgmental of my elephant, I strongly value subjective well-being and resilience, which guides the implicit goals of the conversations between my elephant and rider, etc. etc.
I think that a lot of these therapies crash upon the shoals of mental details: implicit assumptions, values, goals, worldviews, etc. that end up dictating the actual direction and effectiveness of the clinical intervention. If I, for example, used a different metaphor for System 1 and System 2 (eg snake and a snake-charmer), if I had strong religious views that reified and justified my negative self-judgements, and if I valued something far less obviously subjective (like environmental conservation), then I imagine that these metaphors and strategies would lead to very different psychological outcomes.
I find the "elephant and the rider" metaphor as too self-serving and flattering for the "rider". Haidt also has a "press secretary" metaphor, where your conscious self's actual job is to find justifications for whatever the "elephant" decides to do, which is suitably cynical and nihilistic for my taste.
Perhaps like this SMBC?
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/consciousness-3
Yes, but also, "you" have to convince other monkeys that you're sane and dependable.
This somehow invokes this excerpt from Yeats' "Easter 1916" for me:
"The horse that comes from the road,
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute to minute they live;"
Who is the rider, who is the horse, what is the stream? From minute to minute it all changes because it is living.
But also obviously and demonstrably wrong. I can with clear and unambiguous forethought decide to do something, like clap my hands, or say words out loud, or move my fingers to type words on my keyboard, and then my body does it. I can decide to do this minutes, hours, or even days in advance, and then, barring some sort of event preventing me from doing so or causing me to change my mind, my body will obey and do it. It's only the minor and repetitive details that I'm not paying attention to, like breathing or walking, that happen automatically without conscious thought and pre-planning.
Unless you're making the claim that somehow my "subconscious" is making plans in advance such as what to type or when to go grocery shopping tomorrow, in which case redefine that part as "me" because that's the part that's conscious and talking to you right now. Regardless, the elephant and the rider seems way more accurate, given that the rider does actually have significant control and the ability to override things when it chooses to.
>my "subconscious" is making plans in advance such as what to type or when to go grocery shopping tomorrow
I'd rather put that it pre-approves them. Subconsciousness decides what arises to the level of conscious awareness, and lets "you" "choose" the brand of cereal or whatever. Of course, since "we" can only think the thoughts that are supplied to "us", the illusion of near-total control is pretty thorough, so that few even consider questioning it.
Perhaps a better metaphor would be a company with a hundred employees and a boss/manager. The employees run around doing the actual work, the routine operations, and responding to issues that arise that are considered within their jurisdiction. Then when a major decision arises it's brought before the boss's attention and he chooses. And makes the long term plans and agendas for production quotas and goals and marketing or whatever, which are then delegated and translated into bits and pieces to the employees.
From a certain perspective the boss is "in control", in that he makes decisions and then people usually obey them, but from another perspective the employees are "in control" in that they literally physically do everything, if they don't like something the boss says they can just refuse to do it, and don't even have to tell him. But the boss still has agency, he still makes the big decisions, at least the ones he has time for given his busy schedule. He's not just a PR spokesman with no input: he's the boss.
no, your subconscious isn’t making plans in advance. your subconscious is made up of a myriad of automatic, tacit sensory, memory, motor, cognitive, and affective responses and processes that, by simultaneously activating and interacting, lead to the emergent effects that are your thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and consciousness.
the elephant and the rider is, for me, just a metaphor for reflecting on these responses and processes, learning from them, learning about them, and influencing them when i can.
For what it's worth, I found IFS to be a powerful modality for myself. As somebody else noted, it was analogous to my experience with focusing where I got access to parts of myself that are normally repressed or suppressed. I wouldn't describe it as a trance, although I'll note I can't generally access my parts on my own through reflection; having somebody else guide me through the process seems critical.
The IFS approach I experienced wasn't the Schwartz one with very specific roles, but was more oriented towards discovering the rationale behind seemingly illogical behaviors. Once we made contact with a part, we would ask questions like "What are you trying to do?" or "What do you fear will happen if you stop working so hard to prevent it?" I found this perspective very helpful to discover how parts of myself had agendas that were good in principle, but were undermining my conscious intentions in practice. In that sense, I see parts as an extension of Kegan and Lahey's Immunity to Change methodology , with irs approach to discovering "unconscious commitments".
"Works in different ways in different people" sounds right. IME, there's quite a bit of variation in what people's IFS sessions are like. With some you get a session that's basically right out of an IFS book, whereas with others you can recognize some of the same basic patterns, but none of the parts are anthropomorphized or anything like that.
I'll also copy over what I wrote in the Reddit thread:
When doing IFS, some of my clients go into trance-like states and some don't. When I'm the client, I go into such a state much more often than not, but definitely not always.
I think it's a little misleading to say that the therapist is intentionally putting people into such a state. It's not that it would involve an explicit hypnotic induction or anything like that (though there's a lot of hypnotherapy that works with parts, so one can do it that way, even if it's not the IFS way). Rather I'd compare it with the way that some people slip into a really immersed state when creating or consuming fiction. If you focus your attention on something that causes your mind to generate new content, then you might naturally fall into a state that's very focused on that mind-generated content and tuned out of the actual physical reality around you. But the extent to which people do this varies, and it's also perfectly possible to read or write a story without getting strongly immersed in it.
I'd say that pretty much exactly the same happens with parts work. I don't try to explicitly induce a trance state with my clients, any more than a book tries to hypnotize you when you open it. But when reading a book, some people go into a trance/engrossment state of some intensity anyway, depending on their personality and other factors like how distracting their environment is. And likewise, when some - but not all - people close their eyes and start focusing on subtle details of their emotional experience, their focus on those details pulls them into the same kind of a trance/absorption state.
Then again, I do generally try to shift their attention toward their emotions and feelings rather than intellectual theorizing. And a stronger connection with their emotions and feelings tends to involve more absorption in that experience. If someone is in such a state, I generally do want to keep them in it because it makes all of the work that much more effective, so I'm likely to modulate my style of speaking and so forth in a way that supports them staying there. So while I'm not explicitly trying to put them into a trance state, I do do things that are conducive for them going and staying there. But it's also totally possible for me to work with them if they don't go there!
which subreddit are you referring to? Sounds interesting.
This one: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1cx3mp6/book_review_the_others_within_us/
I think self-awareness, as an agent, may end up requiring you to constitute yourself as recursive network of subagents.
Even if you just have a utility function - instead of some grab bag of animal drives - you still have instrumental rationality to deal with. Instrumental rationality itself contains a bunch of subgoals, all of which are at odds in the sense that we have scarcity to deal with and need to evaluate tradeoffs everywhere.
So perhaps any agent, with a goal, and the ability to represent itself, has to represent itself as as _collection_ of subagents, one for each subgoal, convergent or otherwise.
The idea 'individual personalities' then makes more sense if you see personas as a 'mask', or an 'interface to an agent'. If our minds contain recursive agent-like representations of ourselves for each subgoal we have, then this all fits together nicely.
What I've noticed via meditation (and using IFS) is that the feeling of 'this is me' can attach to more or less arbitrary voices, and 'make them speak'. Their thoughts seem to echo around in the mind for a while, and sometimes they argue with each other. What I've been doing lately, to positive effect, is treating them all with love, and when they are upset and pushing for some immediate action, asking them what they'd rather be doing as their job instead.
Or... it's just a fancy name for "brainwashing." Isn't this also the same basic technique used in getting people to join cults and religions, etc. and to abandon more reason/logic/evidence-based ways of thinking in favor of any number of other philosophies? The fact it is done in the name of healing psychological wounds also is not so different. That is often the line used in recruiting for a cult or a religion.
I don't mean to be overly broad in critiquing all of psychology this way. I'm simply comparing the techniques and noting a striking similarity: identifying internal emotional and cognitive patterns as a personality/agent/entity and then giving it power.
Good outcomes are possible. And bad outcomes, as well. It is just a tool, after all, and any tool can be used for good or ill. My point is that the basic technique seems strikingly similar. Or am I missing something?
It does also sound similar to Dianetics, which, according to the literature, is completely different from hypnotism, though it's hard to see how.
But brainwashing doesn't actually work. The cult playbook is isolating people from the rest of society and making them dependent of the cult's infrastructure, the mouthing of whatever bullshit dogma isn't the important part.
I'm not familiar with the cult recruiting techniques you mention so can't compare them, but this bit stuck out to me:
> identifying internal emotional and cognitive patterns as a personality/agent/entity and then giving it power.
I don't know if I'd describe IFS as "giving power" to any pattern. If the client comes to therapy because they experience a pattern within them as problematic, then that pattern already has power over the person. IFS just offers a way to interface with that pattern, often in a way that _reduces_ its power over that person.
Negotiating with the pattern does seem like giving it power - if the therapist directs the patient to negotiate, instead of ignoring it or fighting it, that seems like moving in the direction of giving it power.
I’ve been assuming the parts of IFS are the schemas of memory reconsolidation and coherence therapy.
I’ve practiced an memory reconsolidation technique for a cumulative ~700 hours now to repair a total lack of childhood attachment. I started off with MDMA therapy and then after a while of that realized I had trained my mind to do the same process any time I wanted with no medicine. In all this time I’ve never encountered any metaphorical projections or interpretations of anything in my subconscious. All the schemas I encounter and rewrite are somewhat straightforward after I make them explicit. For example, I may notice intense fear and a belief that “I’m bad” (sometimes spontaneously vocalized in my mind) when talking to someone. Then after a bit of reconsolidation I realize the person had a facial/vocal expression of judgment. That was a trigger for the “I’m bad” schema that helped me anticipate and avoid or rationalize the bad moods and actions of my parents. There are never any demons, etc.
With no intended disrespect, to me there is an irony (word choice?) to someone who donated their left kidney and is also prone to these kind of posts ans situations. I don't think I can put it to words for this blog without significant effort. I think most would benefit from exploring themselves physically and without words, then listening to what fills the nothing. The rest has always varied and will always vary... the debates are moot beyond the individuals own understanding. At this point, my next reflection is to move onto more passive reading 🤷♂️
This is starting to sound a bit like the aphantasia discussion.
Like, I, personally, can visualize things and can even overlay a mental visualization on top of what i'm actually looking at. And people with aphantasia listen to these kind of descriptions, and go: what the hell? you people can visualize stuff?
So, maybe there's something like that going on, where some people are really seeing Sabby the Serpent, and the rest of us with just normal (for a high functioning autistic) levels of hyperphantasic visualisation are going what the hell? you people actually saw Sabby the Serpent?
Yes, indeed. Same level of differentness, but at right angles. I wish that Scott and Dr. Schwartz both could read this little comment I'm about to write, but instead I'll settle for a low-probability of the former reading it.
So. First thing: in my experience (but in zero IFS literature) those who are a little bit self-identified 'autistic'* or "on the spectrum' appear to have vastly fewer 'parts' in an IFS sense, and appear to be very stable in what parts are active (and how much). This is part of their strength -- there's too little buy-in from all the members of a standard inner team to sit down and e.g. work in Haskell for 10 straight hours for an important deadline. For most of us, someone would revolt (or probably most of the someones). But to such a person, IFS seems like mumbo-jumbo gibberish. It's truly remarkable that Scott is open-minded enough to still be hanging in there with this discourse given his inner experience. (*Note the scare-quotes. I'm not claiming that actual diagnosable autism symptoms are inversely proportionate to IFS, just talking about the vibe. It's probably just a spectrum of 'how many parts do you have' with 'spergy' folks like Scott and Robin Hanson on one side and people with a ton, those who were traumatized as children now also having Borderline Personality Disorder).
Second thing: Dr. Schwartz has aphantasia, but appears not to have heard the term. His descriptions of his inner (lack of experience) of IFS parts (he only hears them, can't see them, it's dark in his inner therapy room) match perfectly the experiences of those who have aphantasia and fruitfully do IFS work. Having a lot of parts has nothing to do with visual imagination, and vice versa.
Bonus thing: people with hyperphantasia AND lots of parts, even if not traumatized as children seem to really struggle for unity in a sense that Scott would recognize as having-a-unified-personality, and also go in for 'woo' stuff at a gigantic rate. They also, again in my experience, have a tendency to get distracted by internal content and have a HARDER time with IFS. Their inner content also seems less tractable and more 'real' (beyond being more vivid), and ones who are a little bit borderline and don't know it almost certainly experience some inner phenomena as demons.
I've been thinking about my autism and parts-of-self and I agree with you. I would say that the natural autistic tendency is to create a low number (ideally 1) of very complicated simulations of reality, while the allistic tendency is to create a larger number of simpler simulations and naturally switch between/merge those versions of reality simulation based on the context. This matches with the fact that autistic people have a lot of trouble with understanding context, tend to use binary thinking (because there is only one version of reality), and can be good with details.
My parents divorced at 4 and quickly remarried and my house and parents changed every few days, so it was not possible for me to create a single simulation of reality. I definitely have multiple personalities, but they're all aware of each other and identify as the same "person". Trauma probably makes it harder for different personalities/versions of self to coexist in our head, which can cause dissociative identity disorder or borderline symptoms.
I learned how to be different versions of myself quite early, and have always been interested in many different things instead of hyper fixating on a single topic. So, even though I don't have any of the deep trance-like experiences described for IFS, I do naturally think of myself as being composed of different parts that are utilized in different configurations depending on the context. But, for someone who had different experiences growing up that allowed them to be the "same person", they may be less aware of their components. Scott (and most people who get into Psychology) seems to be quite aware of his components.
Hyperphantasia appears to make it harder to resist trauma -- those with vivid imaginations are reliving (or pre-living) all kinds of awful stuff. It was a kind of copernican revolution for me when I realized that; suddenly it made sense why folks seem so trapped in the hurtful past or anxious future: those are actually happening to them right now.
I'm not autistic, but I am a software engineer, which is probably pretty close to the "vibe". (I score in the normal range on autism tests, leave the tags on my clothes, have a reputation for disappearing at parties to go talk to strangers, etc. but I also play Factorio and use Emacs.)
For me it's less that there are only one or two parts, and more that the only thing that could be called a "part" is just one big malleable ball of clay, or ocean, or something else metaphorical that doesn't fully represent the reality because it's really just a big old brain. There's no long-lived "part" that says it's upset my grandma died: part of my mind is dealing with that now, but in an hour it won't be the same part, and might not even exist. Splitting off different parts of the whole based on which signal they're dealing with so I can turn them on or off seems to me to be confusing the input with the processing, and feels like it might do something unpleasant to the way I think; perhaps I wouldn't be able to stop thinking about negative things as quickly if I gave them cute names and tried to reify them as parts of my mind.
You had me at 'emacs'.
And yes, your description meshes well with what I've heard from men who would self-identify similarly. For the record, that's utterly unrelatable to me -- my parts are so dissimilar that you can see which one is uppermost from my body language, and I couldn't possibly mix them up internally.
I used to hang around on sff.net (now sadly closed) where a lot of fiction authors had their own discussion groups. Occasionally one of them would start talking about how one of their characters was arguing with them about the story, or refusing to 'do' the thing that they believe needs to happen in order to advance the plot. Any they really meant that the character seemed to them to have an independent existence. This seems to be a common experience for fiction authors. Some would say that they avoided discussing this in public (sff.net was public but felt like a personal space) lest they be thought mad.
So the ability for the brain to support 'independent characters' seems to be one of the optional mental faculties. In the case of authors, they don't as far as I know seem to have any concern that these characters can affect their personal life or decisions (other than maybe screwing up the current book). Which makes me wonder if this is related to 'parts' or not. I think that the authors would be uncomfortable with the idea, just as they are uncomfortable with thinking that it might be related to multiple personality disorder. And yet, it seems unreasonable for the brain to have two such facilities for simulation of different personalities. I suppose we'd have to find an author who had done IFS (or had multiple personality disorder) to find out.
See "The Illusion of Independent Agency: Do Adult Fiction Writers Experience Their Characters as Having Minds of Their Own?" https://pages.uoregon.edu/hodgeslab/files/Download/Taylor%20Hodges%20Kohanyi_2003.pdf
(I've experienced IIA but it feels to me different than parts; I wouldn't be surprised if it was more similar for some people, though.)
Very interesting article, thanks.
I don't have any experience with IFS, but I think the invent/discover dichotomy is eliding some subtleties about how imagination tends to work that might explain the confusion. I'm a bit like you here, I think: if you ask me to make something up to represent my anxiety, I'll probably do it consciously and not take it that seriously. If you ask me to "reach deep inside my true self and discover the hidden form" of my anxiety, I'll probably just come up empty and feel awkward about it.
But let's say you start with something specific and easy. You tell me to imagine myself wandering a space that represents my mind. You get me to imagine the walls, the furniture, the lighting - nothing that matters, just stuff that makes the scene more vivid in my mind. Then, whenever any of my "parts" enter the picture, I think I'll end up giving them an appearance without any prompting or conscious effort, just because *not* doing that would be dissonant with the rest of the scene.
I still don't think I'd take it *that* seriously, personally, but it would feel more real than just "making something up", and maybe people who don't already daydream all the time would treat it with more gravitas.
Now that I think about it, this might explain the demon thing too. If your therapist tells you to ask your trauma why it's behaving the way it is, and you can't come up with anything, but you're so immersed in this fictional world you've spun up that your brain won't even consider "I don't know" as a response... what else are you going to say?
In my opinion, what's going on is that deep processes don't have any "natural" symbolism. They certainly don't have words in English attached. But to deal with them in consciousness, you need to access them via a translation area. Perhaps the visual or auditory (cortex?). So what the claim is (or should be) is that you are discovering a part of your mind, rather than inventing it. But is sounds as if they are ignoring the translation layer. The "built-in" parts CANNOT speak any "language", but they can speak to the routines that the language is implemented in. And for consciousness those are largely auditory and visual symbols with a few kinesthetic punctuation marks.
As for the parts...certainly one can create a part with some degree of power just by focusing attention on it. You don't need a trance state to do that, though it does speed up the process. You don't need to calculate what the symbol should look like, and that may be an inferior approach. (I've run into lots of arguments about that, with each side being certain that they were correct.) OTOH, a well chosen symbol certain can speed up the process.
FWIW, I've been trying to create "a magic talent", specifically a visual image of a green line that will represent the direction that I should move. It hasn't been working very well, because what wants to appear is a kinesthetic "gut feeling". So an "improperly" chosen symbol can slow things down. But if I can manage it, the visual green line should convey clearer information to consciousness.
I wonder how much it would help to make a Sabby the Serpent plushie and like burn it or bury it when you get rid of it/purify it. Maybe that helps if you don't have much imagination, and is part of the explanations for some rituals and why some worked.
I have written fiction my whole life as a sort of private, self-therapy exercise. It's like journaling, but I exaggerate what happened to the point that it doesn't reflect the real world anymore, and for some reason this gives me clarity about actual events (perhaps sorting out what I feel happened from what actually did happen). Sometimes I take an entry and run with it for a month.
I've always thought it was curious that the voices of characters just emerge in my mind and speak for themselves. I don't have to labor over the idea of "what would X character say," their words just pop into my mind as part of a full conversation. Characters also seem to have a mind of their own. I can be intending to write about a certain action a character might take, only to get to that place and realize that the character is going to do something else. Again, I don't have to think about it deeply, it just flows naturally from the character I'm imagining and seems to make sense.
In my day to day life I don't perceive myself to be made of pieces rather than an integrated whole. But writing and imaging characters accesses that. I never believe that the characters I write are real in any sense.
I wonder how other creatives are connected to the characters they write?
I don't remember the source, but I vaguely remember reading that Charles Dickens had (what today, we'd probably recognize as) tulpas of his fictional characters. So it's probably not uncommon among creatives.
I first encountered what I realized later was IFS back when I was first seeing a therapist and she asked me to talk to the 7 year old version of myself (where she felt I had experienced my earliest trauma). At the time, I thought it was silly and I felt incredibly self-conscious but went through with the exercise. No trance or hypnotic state - just me having an awkward conversation with 7-year old me (as I remembered me to be) in front of the therapist. I was definitely rolling my eyes on the inside when I left.
A month later, I was talking to my then-wife that I had learned my trauma had started much younger than I had long thought, and in thinking about that 7 year old version of me, I burst out crying on this topic unexpectedly and for the first time. I realized that I could never cry for the adult version of me, but when I thought about this vulnerable 7 year old boy, I could cry for him and his deap-seated fears.
I'm a rational person who processes emotions intellectually before I feel them, but I've come to believe this pathway tricked my brain into getting permission to start processing that long-buried pain by seeing it as "other" rather than me (with all of my long-established defense mechanisms).
Odd. I am yet to engage in good faith negotiations with any snake, unless you count "get out of here or I will kill you!" as a sort of good faith negotiation.
What if it was a cucumber?
(I’m thinking of YouTube videos of cats absolutely freaking out when presented with a cucumber. One hypothesis is that the cat’s instinctive reaction is cucumber = snake.)
Never had this reaction.
Makes sense. You’re too smart to be tricked into mistaking a cucumber for a snake.
But sounds like a practical joke in the making....
It seems possible to me that IFS is a generally normal and sane practice more in line with what commenters have described, and a few loonies and con men built a crazy cultish version on top of its reputation and central metaphor for personal gain and interpersonal power.
This comes down to the eternally boring quesiton of what 'real' IFS is, which means we should probably taboo the term for the discussion. It sounds like the commenters and the book are describing two related but importantly different things using the same term; we can just acknowledge that these are two different things that don't have to be at all consistent with each other.
can I ask the origins of the name Sabby?
I assumed "Sabby the Saboteur which/who sabotages your relationships".
ah didn't put that together
Well, I'm only assuming that is so. We need to ask Scott's tiger demon for the real story.
Just in case this is helpful, here is how IFS works from a first person perspective. I am an engineer and generally a practical man not especially prone to woo. I state this up front in the hopes that it will help you take the following literally:
1. Start with something that upsets you.
2. Do Focusing to find an imagistic handle for it. You will “know” when you have found it because the feeling in your body changes. This is distinct and unambiguous and does not occur in the imagination.
3. Interact with the imagistic handle, which is the Part. The dialog is partly verbal, partly a flickering of images back and forth. It does not feel like I am playing the role of the Part in this dialog. It feels like the Part is an entity.
4. Iff you are engaging with the part with the correct emotional stance (“from Self” in the parlance) it will be very easy to figure out what the Part wants, where it comes from, and how to make it feel better. Once you do this you will feel another shift in your body. This is also not in the imagination.
You do this whenever you feel really strong emotions, especially ones that you don’t fully understand. This makes the feelings permanently better. After a few months of years of doing this as-needed, you end up permanently happier.
I frame it this way because I think the “what it’s actually like and what it actually is” gets lost in the “how it’s supposed to work” and the philosophical questions about what’s really happening. I am also curious about the ontological status of Parts but simultaneously do not really care how it works since I simply observe that it does.
How do you know these “feelings” are not just in the imagination? Actually what does that mean to you? They seem obviously psychosomatic, and like, that’s not bad
In a meaningful sense, every sensation is “just in the mind” anyway, so it’s probably a made-up distinction. That said, I don’t typically have any ability to change the way my body feels using my intent. If I imagine a sensation, that is a very abstract operation and totally unlike actually feeling something. So when I say I am really feeling a change it is much more like feeling someone touching my arm than it is like imagining what it would feel like to have someone touch my arm.
Seems pretty likely that if anyone involved in IFS has ever worked with altered states or trances, the dude writing a book about demon possession would emphasize it.
Hi Scott,
Have you heard of “image streaming?”
Besides your IFS post, I've recently also been reading your "The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind", "Crazy Like Us"and "The Geography Of Madness" posts. I find that all of these show that our interpretation, or rather, constitution of reality at some level (at which level exactly?) to an extent depend on the influence culture exerts on us- big deal, old news.
The most interesting (and most impossible) question seems to be what the schema/innate capacity/mechanism which governs the capacity for understanding our own theory of mind and the constitution of our reality is (ontological q) and to what extent can we gain knowledge of this by reflecting on it (epistemological q).
An attempt that comes to mind is one by the French anthropologist Philippe Descola, who proposed that individuals in different cultures perform a different process of 'worlding', constituting the world at an ontological level; and that there are transformations obeying logical laws (which can be grasped by our reason) describing the change from one to the other process of ontological worlding (out of the 4 Descola proposes) - all of this in his book "Beyond Nature and Culture".
Descola has some glaring issues with his approach, but I am not that familiar with his work so I don't want to draw any conclusions prematurely.
I want to ask does anybody else know any theoretical approaches which neatly contextualize these phenomena of constructing one's reality and help us understand this better, or maybe have more examples which may guide the investigation? Possibly something that might allow for an elegant circumvention of the nature/culture trope.
Interesting pointer. Checking out the book now. I guessed there was ethnomethodology overlap and it turns out Descola is of an anthropology background.
Yeah, he's a French-stylr anthropologist meaning he has a solid background inphilosophy as well. I'm interested if you have any ethnological pointers to share yourself
Exactly! My experience of IFS is precisely (and often literally) the same as pulling out pieces of myself as characters in a novel.
https://2transform.us/category/art/psychologue/
It is exactly the same in my opinion.
Somewhat tangential, but I think the same trance like state of introspection also sometimes happens in deep emotional conversations where you're e.g. processing something painful with an empathetic friend. I've had a few such conversations with a particular pattern of attributes: a feeling of things being very raw and exposed, several hours of time passing almost instantaneously, not remembering any of the details afterwards but feeling abstractly much closer to the person, and some kind of painful emotional thing changing states, as though important processing has occurred.
My model is that there is a process for cracking open one's emotions, moving one's consciousness into a different circuit of the brain and it manifests as a sort of trance.
Relatedly, Borges wrote an entire poem about visualizing tigers: https://allpoetry.com/The-Other-Tiger
I have significant experience with IFS from both sides. Clients tend to ride the imaginary highway because they think Parts are just some patterns of their thoughts. But Parts are actually very somatic so I when in doubt I ask my client about physical sensations they have at the moment. Heart meditation, attuned touch (clients generally only have to touch themselves) and breathing are all useful for this. I always check when I get the impression that client is fused with a protective Part that uses quick and rich imaginary sequences or compicated rationalisations to distract this client and control the risk of contact with burdened Exiles. So I usually stop doing what I did and time to help client notice this protective Part, get in touch with it, learn more about it.
This makes sense to me.
My guess, from reading this and his other essays, is that in Scott's world, there is a very sharp boundary between the conscious and the unconscious. From that standpoint, this kind of imaginal work could only happen either in the unconscious realm -- as a special "trance" state -- or in the conscious realm -- but then you're basically just "making things up", and nothing really surprising is going to happen.
But I think the whole point of modalities like IFS and Focusing is to facilitate more fluid back-and-forth between the conscious and the unconscious. If someone isn't open to that, then I don't think these modalities are going to be useful.
Furthermore, the sharpness of this conscious / unconscious divide is something that varies a lot between people, and I think for most people, it's not nearly so sharp.
And relatedly,
>But even if some other people have so little access to their mental processes that complex metaphors burst into their mind fully formed
It's not about them having less access to their mental processes, it's about them letting those processes unfold more before collapsing them into something intelligible to the conscious mind (like words or clear images).
IFS did not work well for me because I don't really think of my family or internal self that way, but after talking to the therapist I realized it was more about talking to a different version of MYSELF instead of trying to talk to some archetype or family member. This makes sense from a cognitive psychology standpoint because the brain is constantly simulating different versions of reality and naturally switches between them based on the context. One of the main roles of consciousness is to write a narrative where you are "the same person" throughout, but that is mostly a lie. My parents divorced when I was young and I swapped parents on the weekend so there are definitely two different versions of who I was at 7 years old. I even had different food preferences depending on which house I was at. I do think that IFS falls apart when it starts talking about the "core self" because that is mostly a narrative fiction (and one that does not seem to exist outside of western philosophy).
Our brains are constantly running parallel simulations of what could happen in the future, and we often end up simulating the thoughts of people who are close to us. This is important because predicting the thoughts and actions of other people is vital to survival as humans. Most conversations with friends/family would be completely impossible without this deep simulation, as you would need to establish everything from first principles every time which would take forever. But humans are actually quite good at mind-reading, and we constantly create simulated models of other people inside our head. So, in something like IFS you are having a conversation with one of those simulated people. Every conversation you ever have is already with a simulation that merges prior beliefs with some new information from the actual person, so it's not crazy to have a conversation with entirely simulated people.
I'm not a therapist; I've been using IFS, Voice Dialogue, and similar methods for about 30 year, on my own, as a facilitator of groups, and in groups facilitated by others.
I believe that at the root of success in IFS, and perhaps most forms of therapy, is bringing into consciousness difficult or painful cognitions which were not previously in awareness, and changing those cognitions and their sources. My belief is that people vary quite a bit in their paths to accessing those cognitions. In the IFS context, different people are going to have access to these "parts" in different ways, just as some people can totally "get lost in a book" or "lost in a movie" and momentarily feel like they're really in that reality, while others are like "nice images and sounds, I like the story" but don't feel immersed in the same way, and still others are in between.
To my mind, it's all in service of accessing those non-conscious cognitions. Obviously, "official" IFS wants to have very reified parts, with exiles, managers, and firefighters. I think some people are going to experience those parts as reasonably real in the same way that a character in a movie is experienced as real. They may or may not believe that the part is existentially real, and I'm not sure that's important--what's important is accessing the submerged cognitions.
When Scott says, "is it some more complicated place where things happen independent of your "conscious will"", my experience is that people are often surprised by what is communicated to them by an IFS part, so perhaps that is helpful.
Overall, I think a useful metaphor is that of the person or personality as being like a house with many rooms and different people living in the rooms. Sometimes when you knock on the door, the Dad answers. Other times it's the Kid, or the Cook, or the Maid, or the Gardener, etc. Usually the different people know about each other, but sometimes they do not. I really don't think it's important whether that's a metaphor (as I think it largely is) or whether it's existential reality (which I think it largely is not. What's important is helping people have access to these sub-surface cognitions, and to work with them in ways that help people have more functional experiences and lives.
I think the "dream-like-state" described in those articles, knowingly or unknowingly, probably refers to Jung's ~1916 meditative practice of "active imagination." Robert A. Johnson (a Jungian analyst himself) describes how to apply this technique in his 1989 book "Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth." Demons and snakes are, of course, Jungian archetypes - possibly why they appear in some clients' imaginations and in some IFS practitioners' toolkits. However, neither active imagination nor dream interpretation require the inclusion of archetypes.
Disclaimer: I'm not a therapist. I've read a lot and experienced a number of different types of therapy, some fairly niche.
From my perspective the mental health field is undergoing a moderately quiet revolution in re-discovering that we need to learn to self-regulate our nervous systems as well as learning/creating healthier perspectives about our experiences. Traumatologist Dr. John Briere has said, "If Complex PTSD were ever given its due (...) the DSM would shrink to the size of a small pamphlet.” I'm excited to see that happen. More practitioners are trauma-informed, and at least a few are re-discovering that creating and providing liminal healing experiences can be highly effective.
My (I feel, earned) opinion is that we collectively know everything we need to know to make the mental health/healing journey much quicker and much more effective. The future's already here (blah, blah) if you have the money, in which case the biggest challenge is acting on the responsibility that 90% of what we get out of a purposeful mental health journey happens from the work we put in between sessions.
I came to IFS part-way through a serious meditation practice, and it seemed ridiculous to reify new parts when even the existing self is losing solidity. I think a decent heuristic is that the parts are very dumb, like less complex than a 3 year old. Also the more of them are working at once, the stupider the interactions will be, ie tending towards some blunt result like inaction. Over time, I stopped working in terms of parts and started working in terms of habitual reaction, or samskaras in Buddhist terminology.
Having experienced both, there is a definite continuum between the state of shamanic trance and the state required to access internal parts- accessing internal parts is one of the main points of shamanic trance. My experience of a similar process to IFS- which I usually do for accessing information about other people rather than accessing information about my own unconscious - is that a picture pops into my mind fully formed, and by talking out loud about the picture, certain aspects of the picture will zoom in or change and more will reveal itself, and the picture will eventually turn out to be a metaphor for some aspect of their life (this seems to work pretty well in general; I have lots of mirror neurons or something.) But the talking out loud is the critical part - without talking about it to see what the image means, it's just a random image of a hole in the ground or whatever.
I suspect that in Scott's case, he likes explanations so much and he's so verbally fluent that his rational/verbal mind engages with and explains away the input from his subconscious as soon as it arises, which makes it feel like he isn't accessing his subconscious at all. No idea whether the IFS is less useful when it doesn't feel like a "trance" because your conscious mind wants to pretend it's controlling the process. But it might be a good idea for anyone who experiences the same to lean in to the sense that you're obviously making it all up, and approach it in the spirit of a kid playing pretend games, rather than as an adult investigating. That way probably leaves more room for something unexpected to surface.
What exactly is a "trance"?
I have some vague folk-psych idea of what it's supposed to be, but can't really define it. If someone argues about whether some person is or isn't in a "trance" then I don't know what to say because I am not sure what we are talking about exactly.
I've heard hypnotists and NLP guys use the term too, and my impression is that the mental state isn't as intense(?) as Hollywood would have you believe. It sounds like it just means that you're kinda spaced out, daydreaming, or going through the motions. Maybe a little confused.
The algorithm served me this recently, so it's at the top of my mind:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujsmvkWcPG4
> DERREN BROWN UP TO HIS OLD TRICKS - A Neurological Linguistic Analysis- Pt. 1
and here's wikipedia:
> Wier, in his 1995 book, Trance: from magic to technology, defines a simple trance (p. 58) as a state of mind being caused by cognitive loops where a cognitive object (a thought, an image, a sound, an intentional action) repeats long enough to result in various sets of disabled cognitive functions. Wier represents all trances (which include sleep and watching television) as taking place on a dissociated trance plane where at least some cognitive functions such as volition are disabled; as is seen in what is typically termed a 'hypnotic trance'.[2] With this definition, meditation, hypnosis, addictions and charisma are seen as being trance states. In Wier's 2007 book, The Way of Trance, he elaborates on these forms, adds ecstasy as an additional form and discusses the ethical implications of his model, including magic and government use which he terms "trance abuse".
quite a wide definition, isn't it.
"Possibly [a person who finds they can’t do IFS] is either worse at actions like trusting input from outside of active consciousness or much better at observing their thought processes "
I just want to offer that porosity of mind, which Falconer refers to, seems like helpful framing here. Nondual meditators, intuitive people, highly sensitive people, etc., all subjectively know the feeling of a porous mind. This probably relates to the openness trait in the big five? "Real IFS" happens when the mind is porous. This does not need to be a trance state.
When the mind is closed and the "active consciousness" takes over, parts work is either impossible or is a product of the imagination. So helping clients develop a porous mind would be a good idea for any IFS practitioner.
Personally, I have very limited visual imagination. My parts work is mainly energetic, or kinesthetic, and is accompanied by warmth in the chest and a general feeling of openness and receptivity. It does help to orient to experience as if one were orienting to a loved one. Hope that helps
Maybe the active ingredients are the therapist'd warmth, congruence and empathy, and identifying innner parts, etc., is mostly an interesting activity therapist and patient engage in together that's plausible enough to feel legit.
What really strikes me about this is what it suggests about how seriously we should take other forms of clinical experience. For instance, how much confidence should we derive from the fact that doctors have much more confidence in the effectiveness of anti-depressants than indicated by the RCT trials?
I'm not trying to revive the ghost of Irving Kirsch (sp?) -- I do wonder how/if we can distinguish regression to the mean as a result of perturbation and direct treatment of depression -- as my sense is that these drugs have been found via later studies to be more effective than Kirsch thought, but the next time this kind of thing comes up how much should we trust clinical experience?
And that's true whatever interpretation you believe, some clinical caregivers are very sure of a very wrong interpretation.
Sorry if this has already been discussed, or for not jumping in the right point: I tend to just read Scott's articles, and when I think "I would want to chime in", the conversation tends to be already quite daunting, and I give up.
This time, I will try, because I am pretty involved in this.
I practice IFS, in the sense that I offer IFS sessions, and IFS-flavored coaching session, I have a "Level 1" training, together with my partner (Level 3 and Certified in IFS) co-created an company offering IFS sessions (IFS Collective), and we organize an online (free) Parts Work Unconference that is very IFS related (https://www.ifs-collective.com/unconference, next one, the 7th or so, happening this Saturday, as a coincidence).
I use it as a tool. I like it. I find it useful.
The thing is, I am not a True Believer. I come from around 20 years of Buddhist adjacent meditation (with lots of jhana and vipassana experience), Focusing, a lot of facilitating. I had friends pointing me to IFS several times, and always bounced, above all with the idea of Self (Buddhism tends to be big on "no self" and "nothing is indestructible").
A few years ago, during a very traumatic period, it clicked.
It gave some tools that were missing, above all to explore perceived causes of behaviors, and above all, for me, to offer myself compassion.
As I tend to tell it: giving myself compassion and acceptance as a whole did not work, I knew how much I could mess up. But giving it piecewise, to the part of me that felt like that, that worked.
I consider myself quite heretical:
the way I see it, part exists when we talk to them.
(This is taken from Deity practice, "do Tantric Gods exist?" "they think they do")
I strongly suspect that it is like talking to a tree, reading tarots, looking at clouds. As humans, we tend to anthropomorphize: "what does the economy want?", "freedom wants to be free", "the electrons want to...", and we can use it with our own tendencies, giving them the control of the language part.
Trance is not necessary, even if I have a very liberal attitude to trance (watching a movie is a form of trance, most meditations are, a conversation is, etc): we ask questions, and listen to what comes back. We check how we feel about something, and if there is any judgment/anger/contraction, we address it.
Rince, repeat.
That gets to some sort of anti-trance, "equanimity ñana", spaciosness, after a while. "More Self energy". Being open to listen.
It is the same with people: when we actually listen and approach them with curiosity, things can flow.
We can even end up changing roles/sides, as good Bayesians should do.
And what I noticed is that the same happens to part of myself. Maybe because they got crystallized when I was younger, or maybe just because they do not have the full picture: being first respected and listened, THEN engaged with, works best.
When someone goes "ah, that makes sense", something relaxes, shifts. Same inside, when we go "ah... that makes sense, that's why it hurt/I was reacting/fill in the blank".
And then we can decide what to do about it.
My IFS tend to be very discourse based, very much about people bringing all of their capacities and knowledge to the present tasks (and to choosing the tasks), though.
At times I will go "inside", but it is often about appreciating everything that is there.
I am not sure if this has much to do with "what is happening in IFS": for me, it is a way to interact with why we do what we do, and offer ourselves compassion, and seeing what happens from there.
There are other ways. This at times works. At times doesn't.
I find it easy to understand both sides of this disagreement. Theo's explanation of IFS on Twitter / X is beautiful and strongly differentiated from Scott's understanding of IFS. https://x.com/nowtheo/status/1793230046775177247
But (like the mind, I guess) IFS contains multitudes. Richard Schwartz believes parts are very literally true. I've found it much more useful to approach IFS as Theo describes it — using parts as a metaphor.
Questions for Scott and/or other IFS skeptics: Does the version of IFS as described by Theo seem intelligible / legible as a coherent idea? And if it seems coherent but not accessible, are you able to do Focusing? The Focusing process seems very simple, very non-woo, and a skill that's a necessary prerequisite for this flavor of IFS.
The inner imagery associated with IFS therapy sounds like what would happen if a person were deprived of all meaningful external motivation and goals. The brain is still active, so it tries to create scenarios to simulate having a purpose, but they are not constrained by reality due to no external input. Similar to the hallucination caused by sensory deprivation.
I often find myself daydreaming about building things for my family, and debating how to accomplish those things. When I snap out of it, I realize we don't need a hand built wood-fired hot tub, and I don't really have anything meaningful to do other than log back into Slack and answer a few more messages.
After all, not even the most ardent practitioner of IFS would advocate that we utilize this method for decisions with actual stakes. Does anyone think Putin should be trying to find his inner Sabby to see if tactical nukes are an appropriate option in Ukraine?
> and I don't really have anything meaningful to do other than log back into Slack and answer a few more messages.
Well, that’s a shame. I think Albert Einstein’s internal imaginary state proved to be somewhat useful.
Did Einstein create (sorry, discover) entities inside of himself and bargain with them to develop general relativity? Apologies, I don't understand the connection to Einstein.
His thought experiments.
I'm fascinated by the range of theories about what the actual issue is we are trying to address and the number of models being offered up as a way of addressing it. I can't help but feel that it all seems to come down to the old adage "Know thyself." Clearly, we are all wrestling with what there is to know, how we should go about knowing it, and whether we really want to know.
My own feeling about it is, there is a clear duality in being a human being because of the abstract nature of our thinking and the absolutely physical reality of the body. What came to my mind is Dr. Doolittle's "the pushmi-pulu." There needs to be consonance between the two entities in order for any progress to be made.
I have a model that I have been thinking about since I signed up to this blog that is more of a computer-based metaphor.
We are born with nothing but machine code. At every stage, a new layer of emulation is coded over the machine code. It's not a rewrite, it's an emulation. By the time a person reaches 30 years or so (arbitrary) there are quite a few layers of emulation built upon each other. "Errors" or sub-optimal code can exist in every layer of emulation. In order to fix some bad code, it might be required to bore down a few levels of emulation and fix something closer to the original code before attempting to modify any layer above it. Sometimes this is not necessary; a more recent emulation can be patched up and achieve satisfactory results.
In order to make repairs on an emulation that is very close to the machine code one has to really understand the machine code; in this model, the machine code is the information the body provides and it doesn't speak English or any other spoken language; it's a different kind of language. It's machine code.
So IFS could be for some people a very good way of debugging code that is tricky to get at.
Meditation is also described both in very concrete material terms ("increase your concentration, like doing weight-lifting on your amygdala") and very woo woo terms ("direct your Qi, find higher planes").
Inner stuff is just weird like that. There's no *good* reason to restrict the discussion to the external, mutually observable, material world, so people can approach it from both materialistic and supernatural worldviews, and may not even realize they're coming from different worldviews at all.
> A book about communing with demons in the astral plane.
> Written by Robert Falconer.
I believe this has Kabbalistic implications.
https://berserk.fandom.com/wiki/Griffith
https://berserk.fandom.com/wiki/Idea_of_Evil
I did (and doing with my therapist) a fair bit of IFS. I feel like it helped me resolve some issues during a session, but not sure if carried over to other times, even with a similar issue returning.
One thing to emphasize is that we don't just start a session with "so, let's talk to your Parts." We do it around a dilemma or something that bothers me or an emotionally loaded situation I can think up. Then it's much easier to see that a part of me wants to do X but another wants Y. We even use these terms colloquially. Then it's just about concentrating more on each of those parts, personify them (for me the imagery is a pretty artificial non-central part), what they need and want for me, and how I can put them at ease. Sometimes this is in the form of a conversation/debate. I do perform it with my eyes closed for concentration, but that's it. I had a good experience, and it's not mystical at all, and I'm not a mystical/spiritual person.
Tiger Tiger burning bright.
In the forest of the night.
What mortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?
I wish I could ask William Blake what his internal imaginaries state looks like, but he left a lot of clues
Have I been banned and I don’t know it? My posts keep disappearing
This is something I'm surprised anyone gives the time of day, given the whole repressed memories debacle of the 80s made it clear its very dangerous to treat the psyche as having repressed or latent qualities needing dredging up and dealing with.
like the process creates pseudomemories because you are purposefully in a vulnerable, suggestive setting being told by a perceived expert to do this. for this ifs, it wouldn't surprise me if trances and demons erupted out of it.
it also happened when i was younger and a charismatic christian; in the 90s there were ecstatic revivals like the toronto blessing, where a sign of the holy spirit's presence was uncontrollable laughter, and eventually making barking noises. or the base charismatic doctrine of "speaking in tongues," which is not divine translation as in acts, but speaking gibberish as an encoded prayer language that communicates to god when you don't know how.
trance like states might come naturally but i don't see any good at all. this is less the efficacy or reality of the thing but the dangerous power of expect and vulnerable patient.
How does the imaginary space of IFS compare to the process of writing fiction?
For instance, when you write a short story, can you "lightning-fast grab" ideas of what each character would say? Can you see elements of yourself in each character?
For instance, the Bay Area house party stories. They seem semi-autobiographical, so I don't know how much is borrowed from reality and how much is made up. But presumably, there's some exaggeration and artistic license in which you're inhabiting a personality and predicting what people would say. Could you do IFS where your family is the cast of a Bay Area house party(!)?
I've never done IFS but I've always felt very strongly like there are different parts of my mind. As far back as 14, I can remember referring to the parts of my head as Me, Myself, and I.
Me was energetic and hyperactive and excited about stuff and I want to use the word annoying but I think I just didn't know how to channel that while being likeable to others at that age.
Myself was mean and critical and told me I sucked and no one liked me, and against the rest of the members of my head.
I was the logical, rational decider who would observe the others in my head and talk to them and then make decisions about what I would do.
This has evolved over time and I don't use those names anymore but if I'm in the grocery store and see Peanut Butter M&Ms, I will still feel desire and then say out loud, "No, I'm not buying you candy".
Especially if I'm upset, I find I'll start using plural pronouns like We to talk about myself. Or if I'm experiencing an emotion that I don't endorse like social anxiety, I might say something like "he's just a little nervous. Give him some time and he'll be fine".
I'm surprised that when I talk about this other people don't relate. It feels like the normal state of things to me and I don't understand how others don't do it.
I think the idea that you have separate parts that want different things is actually quite mundane -- it's what's going on whenever you feel conflicted about something. My own internal explorations led me to what I later found out was IFS, although for me there wasn't any need to visualize my parts in any way. If I wanted to explore a part that was scared, I would just lean into the fear and see what came up -- intentionally allowing different emotions to be in the driver's seat. The most important element was a sense of genuine curiosity towards these parts/emotions -- this would allow them to speak without fear of being judged.
Incidentally, a while back the rationalists also developed a form of parts work called Internal Double Crux.
I read "No Bad Parts" by Richard Schwartz, the founder of IFS, and later also "You are the one you're looking for" in my attempt to become better at emotional intelligence, learning to know myself better, and becoming better at relationships. The books are well written and very convincing. The idea of the mind consisting of multiple sub-parts and a Self (I always imagined this to be the prefrontal cortex) make intuitive sense to me. Indeed one often wants multiple conflicting things, and I there is this presence that kind of knows best but that sadly isn't in control all to often.
However, my initial enthusiasm quickly faded after actually trying it. How does one identify a part? Visualize it? And then talk to it?!! I completely failed across the board. I contacted two IFS therapists and had 1 session, but in the end I found it way too expensive to actually go through with. One well sounding lesson was that I should be "in my body" more instead of in my head. But apart from feeling dread in my stomach, and tiredness in my skin, I had a hard time identifying feelings in my body.
I genuinely tried to ask my stomach dread what was going on, but no I got nothing. In the book they can all just have entire conversations with their parts.
Did anyone else here give it a go? What are your experiences?
Hey Herman, yeah I gave it a go and was like you when I began - really disconnected from my body and could only focus on the feeling of unease in my stomach (amongst others), similar to you. If you get nothing I'd probably say that's normal, I frequently experience that too. Not sure I have any suggestions except talk from my experience - the times I got somewhere I've observed I was generally in a relaxed state and felt open, curious and explorative all at the same time. Hope that gives some insight.
I've had a pretty good experience with IFS (I wrote about it too on my pub) but I did most of the discovery of my parts by myself. I found I discovered/got to know them mostly via the body then writing about them/mapping them out, not just closing my eyes and seeing who's there in my mind.
To be honest, I don't really get the trance like thing here. Like, you generally get into a meditative/relaxed state when you work with these parts, so that could just be considered "trance-like"? I guess I'm saying I don't understand why it's relevant or why it matters. It's kinda semantic/subjective too - anytime you're getting into slower brain waves (breathing, meditating, relaxing), I believe you're technically in a trance like state aka the state hypnotists work with aka your mind is just more suggestive.
You definitely wouldn't want to have a therapist making part suggestions that you don't feel/agree with and you didn't create here, though that depends on the strength and vulnerability of the client probably.
As for the demons thing, I'm sure people can experience those rogue-like parts, but calling them actual demons is just kinda weird IMO. I can see so many people getting lost in that. Some parts can be pretty combative and rogue-like (I've got one of those), and they can take a bit more time to form a relationship with (integrate). It seems pretty problematic that you'd even entertain the idea that one can have parts that don't originate from or belong to them. So imagine that were the case and then people go into parts work with that knowing, depending on their vulnerability/suggestibility, they might take that belief on and then have it become a reality, or worse yet therapists confirming demon parts are indeed real and the client is vulnerable/susceptible and accepts that belief without any critical thought.
Enjoyed reading your pieces on this topic Scott!
I'm late to this but when working with an IFS therapist, I sometimes went into what could reasonably be described as a 'trance-like' state. It basically felt like I was just very deep inside myself, and the world was far away, and all my attention was taking up by my feelings and fleeting thoughts, and at the end it felt like it took a while to 'come back', something like waking up.
My therapist didn't do anything to induce this (that I'm aware of) beyond going through the standard IFS process as described in the manuals (of asking me to focus on parts, interact with them, etc) and I guess doing so in the sort of hypnotic, calm, slow, intensely-holding-space way of someone e.g. talking you through a guided meditation. Often this was more like Focusing and less verbal, I seldom got chatty parts with an obvious persona in this state.
(I often got those chatty parts when working on a shallower level, when I first started IFS. I now don't really get them. I feel generally mentally healthier than when I started with IFS so maybe they are integrated now).
Other times when I've been in a similar trance-like state:
-on magic mushrooms (I tend to go very 'inside myself' and feel lots of emotions)
-after a long cry
-after really 'transcendent' sex
-(mildly) after trying a tantric energy practice (I've not historically been a spiritual/mystical/woo-believing person)
From this I infer it's something to do with intense emotions.
There is something about 'hiding' too or shyness which I can't really explain.
Maybe slightly analogous: being really absorbed in a book/film?